Hello everyone,
Thank you in advance for the help or guidance. You’ve all been helpful thus far in other forums and posts we’ve been through and are here to get a bit more pointed guidance on where to go.
We are starting a small extraction company looking to extract from industrial hemp using ethanol and have done some trials getting our methods worked out to where we are now looking to iron out some details. We are ending up with approx. 10% THC in the distillate oil from hemp containing 0.517% THCA and 11% CBD/CBDA to begin with. I know this is high (most likely due to issues with the short path in the 3 trial runs we’ve done so far) but by my math, we will still end up with around 4% THC in the distillate once we get the process down, which we still can’t sell.
I know chromotography is the go-to that people discuss when wanting to remediate THC out of crude or distillate oil, but that type of a setup is out of our price range. I’m curious what type of scalable options there are for removing THCA from either the extract-ethanol solution or from crude (ethanol solution that’s been put through a rotovap) so that there is not as much THCA going into the short path.
We have the following available to us, not including our setup for extracting
*10L Short Path Distillation Setup
*Freezer that goes to -86degC
*240mm Buchner Funnel and vac flask with 2.5um filters, diatomaceous earth, powdered activated carbon, T-41 bleaching clay
*190 proof ethanol
Any experience or info on where to go to get us setup to reduce the amount of THCA making it into the short path would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks so much!