Just came back and looked here after thoroughly debasing myself that day with this thread.
I posted the original post in some kind of frustrated mania, which is actually very unusual for me. Yeah, it was a bitch-fest and I am sorry now for the tone of it and giving an undeserved bad review, etc. I’ve actually learned quite a bit about the subject since then, with a lot of good info coming from the salty responses herein. Despite my lame appearance, I think it prompted a thread with some interesting info. And I admire the passion many of you exhibit on the subject. That’s how it should be.
Maybe I am trying to “polish a turd” by mixing this red shatter that a friend made with anything to make it cartridge-friendly. It doesn’t really taste that bad, I just have a lot of it and would love to figure out how to make it taste a bit better while making it work in carts.
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The Suver terps actually ended up tasting alright too, but the same thing happened that always seems to with this concentrate, which is that it apparently isn’t truly dissolved together with the terps. Because when I get about halfway through, the cart stops working right and I think it’s that the terpenes all sort of vaporize first and leave the thicker concentrate behind to malfunction in the cart.
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No, I don’t smoke or eat junk food… in fact my senses of taste and smell are exquisitely, almost painfully sensitive.
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Have you tried decarbing your shatter? Personally ive tried alot of carts with live resin and shatter, most will have the THCA “crash out” and form crystals which clog the intake holes and some/most carts cant heat up enough to melt them back down.
Ive also has issues with lower grade pull-n-snap just tasting horrible after a few hits, maybe fats/lipids?
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Yes, I did decarb it, and winterized it too, although very little crashed out and what did was in the form of wispy, silty white precipitate that barely got filtered out, not anything dark and goopy. THCa isn’t crashing out of it, yet it still always seems to end up refusing to vaporize.
At this point I think that whatever my friend (the source of the shatter) did that resulted in its dark color is also responsible for why it won’t work right in a cart under any conditions. I’m pretty much ready to give up on working with it at this point unless I were to try a totally different approach.
I’ve got so much of it that it wouldn’t be a problem to take like 20-40 g of it and try to clean it up in lab glass, i.e. dissolve it and then do some kind of solvent washes on it in a sep funnel and then run it through activated charcoal. But I’m not sure I even want to spend the time in case it once again ends up not cooperating. The only reason any of this is frustrating is because I got it for free and have a shitload of it, so I want to try to use it to make my own carts. If I could figure that out, I’d have what is basically a lifetime supply.
You got any analytics?
You can confirm decarb with very little tooling using bromocresol green.
A potency test from a 3rd party lab would be ideal.
You can learn a lot with TLC but it would take a fair about of expertise to get the quantitative data we’d need to really address what your buddy handed you.
You say you winterized. What temp? How long? What ratio of extract to ethanol?
Fats and waxes are NOT dark, they may well be goopy…
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Mix in some distillate. Even 10-20% makes a world of a difference when you’re trying to use a shatter that’s still got some impurities in it. Pretty much any distillate you have access to will do the trick. CBT or CBC are ideal since they also help thin it a touch but CBD, D8, etc all will serve the same purpose. The idea here is that if you add just a small amount of a fully refined cannabinoid you will effectively “spread out” any remaining impurities/waxes in your shatter. The coil in cartridges can handle a little bit at a time but too much of that will quickly clog up the pores and before long you’ll be firing dry, overheated hits that will gradually burn (and darken) your oil.
Mix in 10-20% of D9 distillate or even something hemp derived if that’s all you have access to and decarb/homogenize. It’ll hit a lot better all the way through. Also works well with live resin and badder. Straight decarbing shatter and carting it up is a hit or miss but a little bit of clean distillate will deliver more consistent results.
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I think what OP is looking for is what is called cannabis essential oil which has the terpenes and the vegetable oils from the plant as well.
I know that CartFarm has it.
I get it you’re trying to get the “green note” in your carts and that’s the only product that does that, you won’t need thinners like MCT because you’re using cannabis vegetable oil at that point which is arguably better.
EDIT: CartFarm had it but now its gone.
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Thanks, that’s a very interesting tip that I’ve never heard a word about before. It seems counterintuitive to me since I always thought that a defining characteristic of distillate is that it, too, needs thinning to work, therefore it never occurred to me that it could have any property that would make it help a less pure concentrate work in a cartridge. It would be easy to try this. I’m in northern CA so in general I can get anything I need to experiment.
Thanks for trying to help anyway. Yeah I just looked at their site and all they seem to have is hardware, no consumables.
One thing I have tried, that doesn’t work on my stuff, is a thinner called “Pyur” which is supposed to be a fraction of hemp seed oil, which sounds good in principle but it seems to not have anywhere near enough solvating/thinning power to do its job.
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That’s just MCT oil. Definitely not really from hemp.
No, no analytics yet, but I can see that if I keep going down this path I will probably need to go deeper with that kind of thing. As you can imagine, chasing this goal is only worth a certain amount of work and money because I got the shatter for free and I’m not invested in the way I would be if it were product I’d made. Still, I know it’s fairly rich in cannabinoids, so I keep trying because it is a big stash for me if I can figure out how to make it work.
I winterized by dissolving in EtOH at a ratio of about 5g concentate in 60 mL EtOH. Dissolved it at room temp (no heat), then put in a regular freezer for a few days. Some fine talc-looking precipitate did immediately crash out, but was difficult to properly filter out. I ended up decanting off of it, mostly. The resulting winterized concentrate didn’t work any better in a cartridge and of course was now much harder to handle once the alcohol was gone because it was no longer shatter but sticky goo.
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Wow, I guess they’re flat-out lying to people then. The label says “Ingredients: Isolates of industrial seed oil” which when combined with other copy I saw somewhere, implies that the seed oil they mean is hemp.
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You mentioned decarboxylation, but I’m not clear on why that would be needed when this stuff spent a bunch of time in a vacuum oven at temps I assume are about the same as decarb temps.
So the ratio at which you dissolve your solvent affects how close you are to the maximum solubility for anything you’ve got in there.
The object of the game is to find the point where your cannabinoids are soluble, and most of your fats and waxes are not.
Making things cold reduces their solubility…
General starting point is 10:1 solvent, and -40 C. Better yet -80C (staging this and filtering multiple times is arguably superior).
You added too much ethanol, and did not get it cold enough.
When you cant get it cold enough, you have another lever you can pull…use less solvent.
Or even a different one.
At -20C I don’t believe you would have lost much in the way of cannabinoids by bringing your 5g up in 25mls Ethanol.
If your extract is now sticky, but you have not decarbed, then you’ve still got solvent in there.
Assuming you don’t have a vacuum chamber/oven…
Yeah, I can see this not being a cheap date.
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“Decarb!” Has been politely suggested to you multiple times…
Because: decarb lowers the viscosity, and makes it flow better in a cart.
What were those times and temps?
DO you own a vac oven?
I know decarbing has been suggested, and I also said somewhere in the thread that I did decarb some of it at one point and it didn’t make a difference. Regarding my recent comment though, I’ve heard that if concentrate has been through a vac oven cycle, that it accomplishes decarboxylation in addition to purging the solvent. Does it not? It’s the same temp range. So slabs of shatter that have spent time in a vac oven wouldn’t need to be decarbed again, I would think (though I did try, and it didn’t help).
The vac oven was my friend’s, not mine, I don’t own one. He offered me the shatter after he said it went dark on him despite not being in the vac oven too long or at any unreasonable temps. He was getting out of the growing biz and said he couldn’t sell it because of the color so he offered me two big slabs that he was literally going to throw in the trash can that minute if I didn’t take it.
I’m not in the biz at all, I’m just an older stoner with some chemistry experience (not cannabinoid obviously, more in the area of alkene conversion).
I do understand the principle of how decarbing is supposed to work—it just hasn’t worked so far on this stuff.
It’s funny, I feel like half the energy I’ve put into this thread has been spent trying to make people understand I’m not a moron (I don’t mean this exchange with you cyclopath, I just mean as a general observation)
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Can always just steam decarb you biomass in a large kettle before processing. This will take the terpenes with it. No need to worry about dry biomass if you are using the right solvents. 
If putting slabs in a vac oven decarbed them, we would not have shatter!
Yes, 5 days at 100f will probably lead to at least partial decarb. 24hrs at 95 does not.
This is why I’m asking about analytics. Shatter is predominantly THCa (92% is the best I recall hitting, it’s been a while).
HOW did you decarb?
What was your metric for completion?
Bromocresol green might be informative.
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