Making higher quality crude

Lol, yea, I was thinking 300F. God damn imperial system. :expressionless:

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Haha! Yes, way too hot IMO. Even I wondered the same.

I will definitely be looking into all of this, I have a few projects planned this week, including decarboxylation at a lower temperature, introducing a stir bar (they had us manually glass stir rod it every ‘once and a while’), water solubles being in there after decarb as well.

Next week I have a meeting to look into some AC scrubs and clay to remove any impurities, and I just got thru TheLostBiologists tek and MAN did it give me some amazing ideas. It almost seems more beneficial to filter this immediately after a cold ethanol pull, rather than waiting after winterization. It sounds like our entire processes need a bit of an overhaul here.

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I have 75+ gallons of ethanol wash under my belt. I ONLY add dry ice rice to my trim and etoh, wash for up to 40 mins, drain thru bubble bag, into panda spinner, filtered thru fritted buchner funnel with celiye 545 bed, ONLY.

Then into the rotovap

Then purged and decarbd in my 2l spd mantle and bf. Then spd.

Nothing else added, or done.

I must be the spd unicorn

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If biomass is fresh iT works :grinning:

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Not winterized crude , no cryo freezer . 10:1 ole to eth/iso. Stainless steel pot dry ice in it and around it . Sit for 40 mins filter with 20-30 micron Degum repeat winterize . Celite bed, roto, spd. ?
Sound efficient and correct ?

That’s much too high even for a fast decarb. You’ll get thermal degradation with many of the organic compounds in your crude. I’m not surprised that it had an odoriferous bouquet to it.

Take a look at this thread and the research paper I posted there.
https://future4200.com/t/gemstone-decarboxylation-sop/3354/5

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#4 will be of interest to you i think.

Cant believe nobody mentioned catalytic decarboxylation.

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Its the fats that makes the ring form. What solvent is that crude diluted in?

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Always EtOH, 190 proof. After reading many peoples tek (including TheLostBiologist), I have a feeling I found a few places to improve our reaction process.

We freeze our biomass and alcohol prior to the reaction, for a minimum of 24 hours prior. However, I now realize that we are partitioning out our biomass into buckets, introducing dry ice, and then adding alcohol, so the beginning of the reaction isnt even at cryo temps for several minutes.

We do 3 washes of 10 min soaks each - and it sounds like this is far too much. We also remove the biomass between washes and allow to drain in a collander (which drains into the rest of the liquid phase)…I think this is also allowing a ton of fats, chorophyll, etc to get into our processes. Then it just sits in these buckets to allow the liquid to come back to room temp overnight until we begin our rotovape process - no filtering, clarifying, or anything like that in our processes

You would be surprised how wonderful methanol is for removing fats. In fact im finding out that when using methanol for winterization, if you dont filter the solution while its warm it turns into sludge when you freeze it on account of all of waxes that drop out.

In my experience it looks like methanol can drop around the same amount of waxes at room temp than ethanol can at freezing temps. Its by far the best solvent for winterization.

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It would be hard for me to say what that is, it could be due to water content picked up by the ethanol from the plant material thats causing what your seeing but again it would be hard to say unless u can speak with the grower.

Otherwise you should be able to filter that with fine mesh filter, not the green but the murky white.

I’m curious if you have weighed your ethanol after each washing to determine how much oil you are actually picking up wash two and three. Also is your biomass milled?

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This is a great question. We weigh how much ethanol we are using for each reaction, and how much we reclaim, but not during this process since it is in buckets we dont have a scale that would hold this much material.
We have done some lab testing with our spent biomass and shown trace amounts of cannabinoids left so the extraction is complete, but its also shown to be bringing a LOT of unwanteds over too.

As for our biomass, it depends on what is given to us, sometimes its ground material, sugar and trim, or whole flower, or even a mixture of all the above. all completely dried out

How cold is your ethanol when you introduce it?

Thats where I think I need to tweak the process a bit. We have it in a deep freeze for at least 24 hours prior to use, but pour it in with the dry ice and biomass at the same time, rather than allowing the etoh and dry ice get to cryo temps first.

What is your current method of Filtration pre and post winterizing as well?

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Hey G_Boe or anyone else - quick question regarding filtration for winterization processes.

I currently utilize the Whatman 1 (qualitative) filters stacked in triplicate and then inside coffee filters as well. Do you feel these filters would be sufficient to create a bed of CLite, bentonite, and/or AC for filtering? It states these are 11micron filters, although they are not ashless, I have plenty of them on hand.

Celite® 545 has a particle size of 0.02-0.1 mm, or 20-100 micrometers (micron) so yes your filter paper should be sufficient.

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Ok great!

I will be finding out by Friday if the sediment in question is in fact a water soluble or not. I assume this should help identify whether the issue I am seeing is due to water solubles where a bentonite would be needed to remove this issue, or if I should stick with a Celite and AC scrub.

Thanks Scooby

You could try to add a dessicant to the solution to see if you can get the compounds that are causing the murkiness to redissolve back into solution once the water is gone. If they did dissolve back into the solution then that shows you its an excess of water causing that murkiness. The same thing happens when people add water to alcohol in a procedure called louching.

I recommend MgSO4 since its cheap and easily available at any grocery store as epsom salt, although when you buy it its in its hydrated form and must be baked to remove the water.