Lol im just using regular trim gloves…
@Phytoalchemy 48 hours of soaking? At what temperature?
I do two runs at cryo temps. One for 3 minutes for the premium pass and a second pass at 5 minutes for bulk oil/crude material. Those usually both come out golden or light Amber. If all I’m making is a bulk oil or a crude I just do a single 8 to 10 minute run. Those come out black as my soul. I can’t imagine what you’re picking up over 48 hours!
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Do you think putting in a dessicant inline (even moreso than the bentonite, which I’m guessing has some dessicant properties) would decrease the water soluble/dna pull? I’m humming and hawing about working with some fresh/fresher material.
Also, do you notice anything qualitatively after the filtration? I mean in the actual alcohol/resin solution itself? Or do you only notice the differences in the finished product?
Soaking at about -70 to -75, we started observing a darker green past the 48hr mark, again just simple soak with no agitation. Fairly low yielding experiment done with about 200g of freshly harvested material. My only goal was to see how long I could soak the material before it would start turning dark.
Now doing ethanol extracts in a closed loop, that’s another story.
Edit: -70 to 75 Celsius
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There is a slight color improvement with bentonite alone. There is a dramatic improvement in color when the cake is topped with AC.
I wouldn’t say that bentonite acts like a dessicant as much as it adsorbes water soluble constituents. But I’ve never measured the water content before vs after filtration. That would be interesting to look at though.
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If you don’t mind sharing…
Do you know what type/grade of charcoal you use? And approx. ratio of carbon to oleoresin?
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awesome. (Worried you had hard evidence I was wrong 
)
With a cell wall & two hydrophobic membranes between the DNA and the ethanol, only folks who are boiling their material in solvent should be yielding significant DNA imo.
Sonicating during extraction might also lead to additional cellular contents in the crude.
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I use hardwood activated carbon from Carbon Chemistry. @Shadownaught can hook you up with both adsorbants. I use a coffee filter cut to lay flat on the Buchner to hold up the bentonite. The key is to make a cake that is thick enough in the center that it reaches and comes up the sides but not so thick that your filter speed drops completely off a cliff. After you get the cake made (which will take several passes of the solvent through the Buchner as you will have a lot of bipass in the initial pour) you can add the carbon on top, again in a slurry. I add enough AC to form an even 1/8 to 1/4 inch layer. I then typically pull the cake dry on vacuum suction for an hour or so so that it really firms up. Prior to putting in your extract you should drop a good amount of ethanol through the cake to hydrate it. You should also flush the cake with about a liter of ethanol after completing filtration.
We do the cake filtration during extraction while the solution is still very cold. It immediately follows our coarse filtration of a Watman paper filter to get out the bulk of the remaining plant matter. There will be a small amount of plant matter left in the solution that will form a layer on top of the AC. You’ll want to occasionally scrape off the very top of the AC to remove the debris and increase filtration speed.
I’ve found I can get 5 or 6 filtrations out of a cake before the color starts to darken as the AC saturates. If you need to do more you can scrape off some spent AC and add fresh AC on top.
Also, your first pour through the carbon will be the clearest. So clear that you might think you just lost all your cannabinoids. Don’t freak out, this is normal. I’ve never seen a significant drop in yield from using AC.
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Yeah, I hear ya! Being a production facility my goal was to get rid of the water solubles not fully discover what they are, unfortunately. I often wish I had more room for explorative science in my work. But, the job is to make fine oils so fine oils I will make!
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Carbon scrub DE filter?
My working hypothesis (best guess) is that my water solubles are predominantly sugars.
At least the ones that drop out once I add MCT.
I have found them to be somewhat sweet to the taste, and “carmellization” seems a very apt discription of what happens to them upon heating.
I’ve posted here somewhere about getting soft caramel through hard candy consistencies in the bottom of a rice cooker (after adding MCT, so I could raise the temp & get rid of the last of my solvent) .
Also got charcoal a couple of times when I got distracted a the wrong time.
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We’ve also seen sugars though, again, not since the SOP and filtration improvements. 99% of what we were seeing was something else. They certainly didn’t taste sweet! There were two basic kinds that we observed. Some would cling as an irregular white film on a flask in the rotary evaporator. That was what I assumed was the DNA if only for the fact that it looked similar to dried DNA I extracted in undergrad. In decarb they would coagulate into chunks and gobs or just plaster themselves in a layer of charred sludge on the breaker and thermocouple. I assumed those were the proteins denaturing under heat and precipitating out. At times when I pulled the thermocouple out of the oil it would have a ribbon of black sludge dragging behind it like some kind of terrible cannabis pirate flag. It was all very wrong and often ruined the taste and smell of the oil. We are all very glad to have conquered that particular beast.
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It is actually @Akoyeh who is currently battling ppt upon dilution in MCT, and part of the problem is almost certainly that the -80 freezer I was using to extract in died of abuse (unreasonable ambient temps in the lab). So he’s extracting at -35ish
Confiming that his water solubles are sugars seems prudent, but I agree that solving a production problem is way more important when trying to stay afloat in this biz. Yeah, figuring out why it works can be useful later, but if the spice doesn’t flow, then why becomes irrelevant Really quickly.
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@Akoyeh Why not use dry ice and a party cooler? Our blast freezer doesn’t arrive for another month. Everything we’ve done so far has been with dry ice and buckets. Tried and true!
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@TheLostBiologist we are big fans of bucket Tek! We use it regularly. Dry ice and an oversized styrofoam cooler are part of our current SOP. Doesn’t seem to stop us from extracting some unwanted stuff.
I personally dont like the idea of putting dry ice in direct contact with my product, even if i am doing post processing afterwards. I get my dry ice from praxair, maybe you have a cleaner source for lab use.
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The only time the dry ice makes contact with the product is in the bucket. We get our dry ice from a local dry ice supplier. It’s not lab grade, if there even is such a thing.
@Akoyeh adsorbants will set you free! Check out my bentonite/AC tek above. It solved all of my water soluble contamination problems.
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@TheLostBiologist Thank you for such a beautifully detailed response. I am really looking forward to trying it out!
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