High thoughts/terpene extraction

Hash and Stuff Terps
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So just a thought I had while winding down tonight with a few dabs…

I have about 80 pounds of some OG trim with a really nice funk, my client wants me to do an ethanol extraction on for carts and possibly ethanol crumble similar to the early Florida MMJ market.

I wanted to try and preserve the nose as much as possible and I don’t have the option to do a solventless run or I would(client strictly wants ethanol extraction, he doesn’t care about flavor or profile). I currently don’t have any Co2 setup but I do have a couple of dewar cold traps and a couple of medium sized vac oven. Could I possibly set up the cold traps between the oven and vac pump, line my racks with material, pull vac with little to no heat and try to capture that profile or would I just be setting myself up for failure???

If it’s plausible, I’d run it and document it just for the sake of science this week! It’s been a little slow at work

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If you had it staged correctly to condense ethanol before it condenses in and contaminates your terpene fraction then it could probably work.

You’d need to maintain sufficient cooling and probably need baffles on the second stage of the condenser to keep the lighter notes from evaporating under vac. You’d still probably lose a significant portion of the profile

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I was actually considering running my material in the oven before ever introducing ethanol to it. Trying to pull the profile from dry material before actually running the cannabinoid extraction

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someone posted a hack to a cascade decarb oven that recycles through a cold trap to catch terps. It’s feasible but I wouldn’t expect great recovery.

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That should work, but your throughput will be abysmal

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I’m going to give it a test run with some of my personal material this weekend. I’m probably going to double up on the Dewar cold trap and run 2 of them between the oven and pump.

I’ll fill the cold traps with dry ice and ethanol to reach a more optimal temperature, run it first no heat and then I’ll give it a shot at 80f and see what happens. I’ll of course document the whole thing for the thread

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Vac-trapped terps are a great source of fine volatiles. Try to keep the vac around 5-10" to keep the boiling point high while still stripping the terps. Cold as you can get on the trap. The lower your vac is, the lower the boiling point becomes and therefore the colder you will need to be to condense it back out.

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suck harder. use ln2 trap.

n2 sparge is known to help.

I’ve used jacketed columns (cls)

Edit: …and in my experience, super dry material extracts better (cleaner) with EtOH than “cured” material. so trying this will likely improve your extract even if you fail to pull (trap) your volatiles.

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I have done this plenty of times and have a good stock of great smelling terps in the -80 freezer. I do this to almost all the good smelling material I get before ethanol extraction now. I like to put a few pounds of good smelling material in the vac oven at 140F and put a cold trap that gets down to -80C or below in between the pump and oven. I used a small 0.5cfm vac pump and pulled a light/medium vacuum. You will end up with a water terp mix that needs to be separated in a sep funnel. Store the terps in a vial with fresh dried sodium sulfate or fresh dried molecular sieves. They work extremely well for carts, and are light years better than any botanical terps ive ever tried. Good luck, with multiple traps, you will probably get most of those terps out.

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LIVE YOUR LIFE BY THIS. GET A TRAMP STAMP OF THIS.

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I wonder if a tee under the shotgun condenser would work well to strip terpenes :thinking:

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Staging traps is important…tell has it, that done right you can catch the water first.

Have you noticed less color in your crude when running biomass post terp strip?

(I’ve only run butane on material stripped this way so far)

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I hadnt considered that to be viable, but hell yeah mane.

I honestly haven’t noticed a difference, although I rarely extract any biomass these days, and the input material varies so often it would be hard for me to tell

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It wasn’t…

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Re-vac purge the water fraction and do a slow distillation of the water… there may be water soluble terpene alcohols in it… not many exist, but they are very special. :wink:

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100% there are some goodies in that water, I havent tried the careful distillation, that sounds better than LLE to not introduce any solvents. But LLE extraction of the water with pentane or even butane works very well to pull the rest of those goodies out of the water

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Curious as to what your yield is on a typical run? 1%? less?

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I’m not expecting much if anything. Just doing it for the sake of research pretty much. I’m running an etoh extraction either way so if I could save those volatiles, great! If not, like @cyclopath said, It’ll further dry out my material for a cleaner extraction. It’s worth a shot imo

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Some kind of method that uses a bead bath to get better heat distribution could probably get this going fairly speedily.

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