Hey all,
I am hemp grower looking to add some new products to our farms revenue stream. My wife (retired chemist) has been working to develop a full spectrum oil with a nice cbd/terp profile. We are small batch hemp and therefore small batch oil. We use crock pots and a blend of MCT/Coconut oils to extract the decarbed material. We strain out the plant material with cheese cloth and done. However, the oil is pretty dark/green.
So…question of the day. Without over complicating things, what is the simplest method to pull the green from this oil? I am thinking a buchner with DE and activated carbon. However, this isn’t something we’ve done before and want to get our current batch clean and bottled ASAP. I get the feeling the DE/Carbon scrub route might work best when alcohol is involved?
Any guidance, suggestions or alternatives? We would greatly appreciate the assistance!
you are gonna have a fairly high amount of loss trying to filter with the oleoresin suspended in MCT. Ideally if you don’t want chlorophyll try the bucket tek (cryo ethanol)
you are going to have a better time if you extract clean then trying to clean up a dirty extraction
Makes sense. Suggestions on extracting clean or cleaner beforehand with the style extraction I mention? Maybe not using heat and letting it soak longer in the oil? Maybe not decarb the flower and heat the oil after it’s finished a long soak to convert the acids?
It sounds like we should go ethanol/evap pretty quick, but were hoping for a simpler method with less process for small batch.
He did give a suggestion. Cryo ethanol extraction. Simple is not better here
There’s certainly something to be said about how much less hazard rating you’re going to deal with by not using a flammable solvent.
I think your Chlorophyll and DE sounds like an intelligent option, send samples through an analytical lab to get your proper data and losses and decide if it makes sense.
De stops fines, not chylorphyl
Also ac steals a small amount of cannanaboids
Edit
AO stops lipids and waxes cryo/freezer cold
Yup, but it might be worth it, especially if we’re talking, bare minimum 50-100k in engineering permits and building upgrades to handle solvents.
You can bleach the chlorophyll by leaving the oil in sunlight for extended period. It won’t get rid of it technically but it will improve the appearance of the oil
But will also remove precious cannanaboids as well.
Or at least degrade them into cbn.
Graywolf schooled me on this 5+yrs ago, maybe even longer.
Norit does well removing chlorophyll. Fines can be stopped with 1-2 mircon whatman filter paper.
Why not skip on extracting the chlorophyll. Also sounds like you are usin flower that’s been decarboxylated. There is a lot of terpenes you lose. If you do a quick alcohol extraction you’ll have less worry with chlorophyll and you may be able to preserve more terpenes by pressurizing the container You are using to decarb your crude oil. Some states don’t have limits on the ppm for ethanol. Other benefits of using crude to start with is you’ll have a much better idea of how much medicine is in each treat
Activated carbon is very good at grabbing chlorophyll but activated bentonite also
It s more often used in the edible oils industrie for this purpose than AC
Acid activated that is
And it makes a self filtering cake wich helps taking out activated carbon particals
Whatman for life
OP said they want to keep it simple in response to a basic ethanol extraction. Doubt they’re going to want to go the full CRC route
Anything that entails a long “soak” is going to come out dark as mud. You are better off doing an ethanol extraction because a) it’s cheap and b) it can be very easy. It’s the same process as brewing coffee except your grounds are your plant material and the water is switched for ethanol. The rest is just tech to optimize the process. Lower temps tend to be best for less chlorophyll.
Filtration is not going to do a whole lot other than remove some tiny dust sized particles of plant material. Which is worth doing either way because they are going to be in there with the way you’re doing it. But it’s not going to “polish a turd” into gold. To get best results with filtration you’re going to need to dissolve it in ethanol anyway so you might as well just start with the ethanol to improve your yield and color at the same time. You’re decarbing it after anyway so it’ll be easy to remove the ethanol. Removing ethanol without decarbing is the hard part but that’s not the case here. You can do it the easy way since you’re decarbing well over 200 degrees. Just obviously look into safely handling the ethanol fumes. There’s a lot of ways people do this safely. Look into what’s best for your scale and regulatory needs.
The other option is to do it the old fashioned way and wash the trichs off all your material. It sounds like you’re doing this pretty small scale/ low tech. Bubble hash it then press it at 200 or so for some crude rosin. It will likely come out dark if you’re using leftover material but once you dissolve the rosin in mct it will be closer to amber because it’s diluted. This just removes a lot of the chlorophyll from the equation. You can get a decent press for 500 bucks. Bubble hash washing machine for 150.
Dry ice and ipa/acetone gets you to -78°C. Extract here with food grade ethanol. easier to deal with before than after. My 2¢
Whatman gang!
Hello Bogaat, if you have a Buchner, we have a carbon pad (cellulose, DE, carbon) that you can place into it and then pull your vacuum. We have a carbon that is formulated for this purpose and it works great. What size is your Buchner? We also carry filter paper and would recommend you place this down first and then the carbon on top. Thanks, Greg gregh@heyesfilters.com
Cryo ethanol should be pretty simple for a chemist with bucket tech. Getting rid of the alcohol and the original chilling being the major issues. Consider getting a source turbo ($600 at Walmart) for alcohol recovery and dry ice isopropyl bath bucket tech for chilling. You could be up and running in 2 days and end up with a much better product.
I used water when I did it. I think it washes away some of the undesirables, I was still kinda green though. Maybe alot of water could be effective? I used a sep funnel with mct and with solid coconut you can just cool it and pat the solid chunk with a paper towel
Mine came out about 5%cbd and 50-60% yeild. How much are y’all getting out?
Cannabis%20planta%20medica.pdf
I’m not picking up much green with olive oil. I just filtered some with DE and it looks pretty close to the color of the olive oil pre-infusion.
