I have succesfully gotten golden yellow colored extract with ethanol. I would consider myself very small scale, i have one 6"x24"jacketed column that i exctract with, i have about 10-15 gallons of ethanol total that i recycle.
I pre chill both the alcohol and green material in the freezer overnight, then transfer each “batch” (in my case 2lbs of nugs and 8L of ethanol split into 2L Boro glass containers) into a cooler full of dry ice. They both sit for atleast 20 minutes before being used.
I have an isopropyl/dry ice slurry in the jacketed part of the column and load silicia 60a and a tad of T5 filtration clay at the bottom of the column to aid in filtering. I put the material into a sock that i stitch together and then pour the ethanol into the column, the ethanol containers will be way too cold to hold even with triple gloves on, use a foam sheet that sometimes comes in shipping packages to hold the containers when pouring in. If you are able to handle the ethanol with just gloves, u didnt get it cold enough.
It doesnt really matter how long u soak for but i usually soak for 15 minutes and then it takes about 5 minutes to fully drain out for me.
From the 8L i usually get 6L back, so i put in 6L more ethanol that was prechilled in dry ice aswell. That is my rinse, that usually only sits for about 5 min before draining. I use this ethanol for the first soak of the next material. For trim i use it 4 times, for bud 2 times and for kief 1 time.
I throw my material into a centrifuge after its done and recover about 1.9L-2L (depending on how dry/wet your material was to start with), this extract is green when running kief and browinish/yellow when running bud or trim. I keep this seperate and is usually thrown in when i run heads and tails.
One thing i notice is that if the extract is left out in a bottle with oxygen in it, it will turn slightly red over time (a week of sitting there). So now i make sure to rotovape the extract right away and anything that is sitting with “air” around it is flushed with nitrogen. For example if i still have more ethanol to roto at the end of the day i blow nitrogen in before capping the extract resevoir. If theres anything in my roto at all when im done with the day i pull a full vac and then back fill with nitrogen. Since doing that my extracts have been staying golden yellow even sitting for awhile.
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