Just Your Mother, Distill the Rest

Many ways indeed. Stripped and water soaked, how would then dried plant material react to a cold non-polar hydrocarbon extraction? I’ve read of reports of there being problems with ethanol extractions after such a process.

Do you mean a secondary extraction with Ethanol on the same material after blasting ? If so, I always make crude for distillate out of second runs because the profile of the plant is already stripped out

If you do the blast correctly, youll use extra butane and there will not be any cannabinoids worthy of washing with the Ethanol IMO

Properly dried plant material blasted with non-polar dry hydrocarbons (99% N-Butane) will pull in less terps overall, resulting in a more stable bho, because there is less water.

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I meant after the steam terp strip.

why distil?

if you actually get crystals, those will be in the 95-99% purity range when washed.

decarb them to go from 95+% THCA to 95+% THC.

done.

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Great question! The end product needs go into a vape pen. Would decarbing crystallized thca to thc rearrange the extract into a clear viscous distillate like material?

decarbed diamonds should be considerably clearer, and higher potency than most distillate I’ve run into.

yes, the viscosity does decrease upon decarb.

you’d still need to cut with terps, or a little of that sauce from step one, to make carts.

I haven’t performed this trick, but it would be a tek I could get behind. I’m still not convinced that distillation (especially batch mode in an SPD) is an appropriate way to treat ones meds. see THC Imposters (Isomers)

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I’m very interested in this idea. Seems like one could short cut alot of processing given a proper crude extraction.

doesn’t it?

…but you need much better input to get decent sauce with large (easily washed) THCA crystals.

so you can take last years abused leftovers via distillation, and add some store bought terps, or take great fresh frozen material and make diamond/sauce based carts…

I know which ones I want as a consumer.
I’m only guessing which ones have the higher margin.

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I think the best way to get those most value out of your product would be to steam distill (under vacuum) your terps first. Then do a hydrocarbon extraction after to get your thca. Reintoduce fake (food grade) terps to crash out your thca. Decarb your crystals if your going to end up in carts. Then reintoduce your original cannabis terps.

If the material is old and smells bad, then intoduce fake terps instead of the original stuff u pulled from the steam distillation. Those bad terps can still be used to crystallize future batches so its not total garbage.

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I’d argue ('cause apparently that’s what I do :wink: ) that hydrocarbon first then crystallization is less work, and at least as efficient given input that is worthy of either route.

Having not done either, I’m clearly just playing devil’s advocate :smiling_imp:

I’ve also given away my bias that laziness drives innovation.

anyone here played it both ways (or either) and want to share?!?

Edit: I guess there was also a third route suggested above, which was steam then etoh. which I’ll give you might be easier to get past the fire marshal. reports here suggest opening all the cells with the steam causes down stream issues.

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Ive seen something recently on IG that i thought was a cool process i dont see a lot of people talking about.

I saw dude do a hydrocarbon extraction which looked to be PHO crude first. The oil looked fire and the terps looked like they were already seperating. THEN he said he was going to distill the terps off somehow to get the cannabis terps. Then filter the oil for distilling the cannabinoid. I wonder about this process and how viable it might be in getting real cannabis terps.

This also might help with Live Resin Terps cause it seems easier to capture good tasting terps from live resin with hydrocarbons, and it seems harder to pull good terps from live material whether steam or any other method for capturing terp from live material.

I really dont remember who this was. I was just flipping threw stuff before bed or something.

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Exactly!

Although the lazy sob in me still wants to know why one would distill when decarb should suffice.

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I’ve been seeing people do butane extraction, separation, then run the HTFSE through short path.

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@future?

Not bad for a guy who has no interest in carts, nor time to speak of them. Smh. FOH!! :man_facepalming::wink::facepunch:t3::dash:

:sunglasses:

would you believe I huffed on one for the first time at MJBizcon yesterday?

first HTFSE cart at least…

smelled it. had to taste it.
apparently that’s the standard response…wtf is that?

~50% thc.
Still don’t like disposables or diluent.

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I have been wanting to take doodoo diamonds, clean them up, re-constitute them, and either distill or if decarbing would suffice. Now that it’s mentioned, that may be an option, instead of stilling. I mentioned this on a thread of future’s on the Graham Cracker once, I got yelled at by someone saying they could turn crude into disty faster and that I shouldn’t bother. I took it as a challenge to do it because that’s what I was going to do. I have some dirty ones that I want to wash and play with

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decarb and distil faster than you could decarb?

or faster than you could wash and decarb?

either way I don’t see how they’d come close. given that they can’t start till they’ve reached your endpoint…

They could use the material to make disty faster than I could grow doodoo diamonds, wash them, regrow them, repeat if necessary until clean, then still. Personally, I didn’t care if he could, that wasn’t my objective. I think it would make excellent disty. If you could do a big enough run. There would/should be zero color, in theory, or smell. Less processing between. I think it’d be a fun experiment. One day I’ll give it a whirl when I don’t have a hose being shaken at me all day and I can actually play “science”.

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Nice!!