Not too long ago I bought some Water soluble Delta 8 from MC Nutraceuticals, I was looking to infuse Various Lemonades, water and non alcoholic drinks. I made a few batches just to see if there would be any separation which appears about 24-36 hours after sitting (Sometimes it leaves Cannabinoids on the bottles, homogenizer or the beakers.) Let me know if anyone sees some hiccups in my SOP and if you would suggest anything different. I Hope Everyone Is Staying Safe and Dangerous.
SOP:
1.) Heat the liquid to about 120 degrees Fahrenheit on the stir plate
2.) Throw the Powder into the warmed Liquid (About 75 mg per 16 fl oz.)
3.) Let it sit on the stir plate for 5-7 minutes as I steadily increase the speed of the stir bar
4.) Once it looks fairly mixed, I homogenize it for about a solid Minute (It usually has a layer of Foam sitting on the top)
5.) Since their is foam on the top I throw it in the vacuum oven and turn on the vacuum pump until all the foam is gone.
6.) Bottle each accordingly but around days 3-5 I see the powder on the bottle of the bottle.
I’m curious how these companies like Mad Tasty, Aplos or CANN infuse their drinks without seeing any residuals or separation in their products. Or how companies like Nano Hemp, Cloud Water or ALT infuse clear drinks that look like water?
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Nano-emulsification can get a clear, stable drink but it’s not the easiest to figure out. A lot of companies spend a lot of time and money doing this R&D. Water soluble powder is almost certainly not going to get you what you want.
Do you know the RPMs of the mixer you are using? I’m mixing @ 9000RPM for >30min then sonicating to create emulsions that don’t break. You will need a surfactant to help create the oil-in-water emulsion.
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Have you confirmed that the powder is in fact cannabinoids? I have no idea what their formulation is, but if it is a powder, it’s probably safe to assume that there is some kind of carrier involved in allowing the product to be a powdered water soluble product (for instance maltodextrin is often used to assist in vacuum spray drying techniques to powder an oil for water soluble use downstream). It could be that this is what you are seeing and it may not necessarily be the cannabinoids but residual excipients that have fallen out of solution.
Furthermore, just because something is water soluble, it is coming from an oil and hydrophobic origin, so it may require more than just mixing in the powder to get something completely clear and transparent in the case of infusing just water. If you are infusing lemonades or other products, now we’re talking about the impact of pH and all of the other ingredients that are already found in the drink prior to the infusion. What impact and interactions are going on with your beverage with the water soluble powder you purchased? This is something to consider and may also play a factor in why you are seeing some precipitation in your final formulation.
I don’t have an answer for you, without knowing the entire ingredient list in the water soluble powder, the entire ingredient list in the beverages you are infusing and the concentrations of each of these ingredients and other physiochemical properties such as pH, just looking at that SOP alone is probably not sufficient enough for anyone to give you a clear cut answer on what is going on.
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I have a Scilogex D500 homogenizer that does 10,000-29,000 RPM. I have it cranked all the way up for about 1-2 minutes.
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That slipped my brain, I imagine it is not just cannabinoids and that they have other ingredients as well in the powder. It sounds like a lot of components to considered, do you have any suggestions on what I should do or how I can educate myself on fixing the problem?
Well going back and reading your post you mentioned foam. Foam is often the byproduct of some type of surfactant present - this is most likely surfactant used in the water soluble powder formulation. Surfactants aid in developing a proper system for oil in water emulsions and to improve water solubility. So I might assume in this case that the powdered product should already be formulation to be water soluble in plain tap water with a neutral pH but once you start adding in other chemicals and start altering the physiochemical properties of the beverage, I am not surprised that we see some excessive precipitation.
There are a few things I might suggest:
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I would pour out one of those bottles, collect the residue on the bottom and send the residue in for a cannabinoid potency profile test as well submitting the decanted liquid portion so you can determine the actual potency in the beverage. You can then take this information, knowing how much theoretical cannabinoid you put into the formula and deduce how much may be homogenized in the drink vs how much has precipitated out. If it turns out that the precipitate doesn’t contain any cannabinoids, you could potentially just mix the beverage and powder in a bulk mixture, let it sit and precipitate and then decant the beverage off or filter the precipitate out. Now you have a beverage that contains your cannabinoids, and you’ve removed the precipitated excipients that seem to fall out of solution. If the precipitate is some or all of the cannabinoids, now you have a formulation issue that requires a lot more work to figure out what’s going on.
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Gather more information on what the ingredient list is in the product you purchased as well as the information on the beverages you are infusing and bring that information back to the forum which would allow people to have a much more thorough understanding of the systems you are working with and potentially provide some feedback you can use to improve your formulation or fix the precipitation issues.
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As @EHO_AZ has stated, creating nanosoluble, water soluble or any other kind of complex formulation (not just in cannabis but in all industries) often requires a lot of time, money and R&D work to optimize the system. If you do not have a very strong background in chemical formulation and do not have a strong knowledge of some core principles in creating emulsions, such as HLB scale, surfactant types and uses, etc… then I would advise you either work with a consultant who can have more hands-on time troubleshooting these issues for you or spending time learning about chemical formulation, oil in water emulsion chemistry and those types of subjects. The internet has a lot of good places to start learning this stuff…but keep in mind that learning theory or principles and actually doing chemical formulation work do not always align and I probably can’t count anymore the number of times that what I thought would happen in a complex chemical formulation was not what actually happened. There is a lot of trial and error involved in gaining the knowledge and experience to be able to troubleshoot these types of things on your own or to have a strong enough understanding of what is going on to know where to find the right kinds of help to answer your questions.
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