Is it worth distilling from crude or just buying distillate?

I hear prices for complaint distillate is pretty low in Los Angeles, is it even worth it to distill from winterized crude on a 5L short path? I have a 5L short path sitting collecting dust and a license but with very limited capacity is it even worth it?

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You’ll need to mathimacate that one. How much can you get crude for? How much can you get disty for? How long will it take to distill? How much will it cost you to distill? How much will you lose?

Now decide which makes more sense to you…

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All depends what your time is worth my G. Keep it moving is my motto.

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Leave it to the big dogs. Unless you have a ton of time to burn.

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It depends on a lot of things. I’m trying to find a disty plug.

I second what is your time worth, if not what is it worth hire and train someone else to do it.
If it isn’t even worth hiring someone else to take over eventually it’s probably not worth it to begin with.

There’s some people near me (a little north of you) with a very small co2 machine and a 5L spd sitting in a multimillion dollar facility still waiting on approval from the city. We have a couple 100+ acre rec grows and plenty that are 5-50 acres in the county…
Couldn’t have been very many folks good at math or familiar with the market building that one out…
Read the market, find where you fit in. Buy some licensed distillate and try to sell it first for what you bought it for.
Distillate is distillate is distillate more or less, so it’s hard to stand out from the rest going that route.

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Lots of things that need to be considered, but the biggest one is probably this - how much would it cost you to make a kg of distillate vs. how much it would cost to buy a kg of distillate.

We used to make BHO, distillate, edibles, topicals, vapes, etc. Everything.
When we scaled, it made sense for us to lose the extraction/post-processing (even though we loved it :frowning:) and just focus on our finished products. They were more profitable and required a smaller ICO (Initial Cash Outlay) than making distillate on a large scale would.
Plus, we can buy it for almost as cheap as we could make it. So it made sense for us to just buy distillate…

But if you already have the equipment and resources to make it happen, distill that shit!

My 2 cents is it literally comes down to margins and volume of sales + the time needed to get those margins. There are a few other variables but those two are definitely the most important imo.

When I buy a liter of distillate I know the products I produce range from about 100% - 500% profit margin.

A. If that 100%-500% can be produced and sold repeatedly then you put your eggs into that basket and ramp up production.

B. If that 100%-500% only takes a fraction of your workable hours during the day then you look at other ways to up your profits.

If I was falling into category B I would then weigh whether or not making distillate would outweigh looking for new buyers, new products to produce/sell, etc.

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