@tweedledew Have you had success reusing your recovered methanol?
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Yup no issues
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Awesome! Thanks, excited to try this next week… ethanol winterization always seemed so inefficient. How are you filtering? Any media used, like alumina?
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Alumina yeah
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Why would you want to use methanol?
It’s more polar than ethanol so you need less of it. You can do the winterization instantly at room temperature.
Polarity is one factor of many for a good winterization.
Waxes crash at room temp in ethanol too. I haven’t done any winterizations in meoh (room temp or cryo) but I’d bet my final dollar that waxes would crash out of a room temp winterized solution if you brought it down to cryo temps. Im not buying it.
Well yeah you can add water to ethanol and it’ll have the same effect. Just need more water and higher solvent volume.
The whole point is to not take 3-48h and however much $$ it takes you to do a cryo run.
Water is free. Methanol is cheap and readily available. Time is precious. Rent is monthly and unforgiving. Fast processes are best processes provided they’re accurate & thorough.
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https://fscimage.fishersci.com/msds/14280.htm
https://fscimage.fishersci.com/msds/89308.htm
agreed. however, there’s nothing to suggest its accurate and thorough. There’s a million reasons not to use meoh. just cause it works does not mean its the best practice. I still am not seeing an advantage to it.
unless someone can convince me meoh actually does a better job, I would stick with the process that yields best results.
Accurate and thorough is pretty easy to see… My distillate potency is the same in ethanol or methanol winterized solutions. Haven’t seen any difference in lab results.
Every non-distilled alcohol you’ve ever drank has methanol in it in way bigger parts than per million. Every ripe piece of fruit you’ve eaten has trace methanol in it.
Reasons to use:
Lower solvent volume
Cheaper
Easier to access
Just as thorough as ethanol winterizing
No need for cryo ($$ saver) (though you can avoid cryo with ethanol as well, just need more water)
Much better LLE potential and easier further post processing
Reasons not to use:
-Toxicity if you’re bad at handling solvents (ethanol is also a known carcinogen)
-Cuz you just like it better
-Residuals testing? Depends on your final product
Dunno. Do what u like.
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Do you have any issues with residuals with methanol? We have to use it for chromatography anyways.
the one thing id like to add is that cannabinoid potency =/= quality. eg: 99.9% d9 with .1% cholorphyll is still gonna look like bunk. the effect is also present when talking waxes (albeit less so because of the ratio of product:contaminant).
so in your case, methanol at rt may crash most of the wax, but you wouldnt have any way of knowing if you got them all. cannabinoid potency will not help you there.
i used a particular winterization process for a while - always though I was getting all of the wax. a ton crashed out, the oil was clear, etc. than i modified my procedure, and crashed out another ~1% w/w of already “dewaxed” stuff. the potency increase (1%) did not match the increase in the quality of the product.
i would love to see data suggesting that rt meoh actually does as good a job as cryo etoh, and then data suggesting that temperature plays no role in cannabis oil winterization with methanol. until that point, its hard to make any argument against cryo etoh.
and yes, toxicity is one of the major issues. oils get put out all day with hundreds ppm of etoh and no one notices or cares, but if it were the case with meoh we’d have a big problem on our hands. i try to avoid such toxic solvents unless you have no other real choice
vapor pressure and boiling point indicate that you shouldnt have any issue purging this solvent (at least compared to etoh!) however, as tweedledew has mentioned, the final product would matter. if youre talking about a sheet of diamonds, you might have issues hitting appropriate levels. a pure (decarbed) oil? should be no problem.
All a matter of desired end product and how much money you wanna spend.
I do everything room temp.
I spend very little money.
I make quality product
Those are all good reasons
Do whatcha wanna do!
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Everything I winterize is headed to the still anyway. So there is no fear of residual solvents for me. It’s 1/5 the cost of ethanol and I degum with citric acid during winterization and go to LLE after that, so that is a lot of alcohol going to the waste drum after being heavily diluted with salt water because it would take so much time to recover that it’s not worth it.
We know that it’s at least as effective as ethanol for winterization (I have a hunch more effective but no data). I know the proper precautions to take to handle it safely and all the other benefits outlined above make WAY more sense for my own SOP. Methanol opens up possibilities to increase processing efficiency that would otherwise be cost prohibitive with ethanol.
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Cold is expensive
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^ That too. In order to pull as many fats as I pull at -26c with methanol I was having to get my ethanol winterization to dry ice temps.
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Yeah I usually run an 85-90% methanol at 5:1 inside a regular freezer (-18) if I’ve got some time or don’t want to deal with it right away.
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Last but not least it does not form an azeotrope with water
So recovering for future use is easy
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How do you suppose we would have a big problem on our hands?
It pretty obvious you’re talking out of your ass.
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