That’s definitely my biggest thing! I don’t know how to differentiate between hemp biomass and thc trim. So it’s a big gamble it seems
A vail of water with NaOH disolved will show for cbd content
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This is the trim I was sent. Just asked how old
Yep… I heard about that last year.
Best thing I can recommend for future deals, and something I use myself is a cheap gas chromatograph. Pretty easy to learn and operate, and a good way to protect a business from a deal going sideways. I like to get a small sample from the farm in question and shoot it in house to get a general idea of cannabinoid content.
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Get a PurplPro.
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I take it you have one and like it?
Any chance you could add a review of the device to the In House analytics thread?
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Yes, I do. I also own a GemmaCert, and both produce very similar results when testing the same flower, which boosts my confidence in the tech.
The Purplpro is perfect for an extract artist in the respect that they can test their material pre/post run to ensure a: starting quality and b: that they are getting the most out of their biomass by testing their material after extraction.
From what I understand PurplPro will soon be able to test concentrates as well (potency only - no terpenes)…
I’m in Panama, on vacation right now. I will post a thorough review with photos/screenshots when I get back to Canada in a week or so.
I’m a new member here, and I just wanna give a big thanks to yourself and the collective of individuals on here (you know who you are) who seemingly really know their shit, and are willing to share their knowledge and operating experience here for the world to see.
I’ve learned a LOT since stumbling across this site a while ago, and the countless threads/SOPs here have made for a great way to kill time in the sun here when just feeling like being lazy.
This is a great community. Glad I came across it…
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Get a scope and look at the trich heads to see if it’s been previously extracted
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Please do follow up. I checked this out at biz con and if I can get some real world good reviews I may just have to grab one :). Welcome man!
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Well, the problem is that the alkaline beam is a qualitative test… it’s not exactly quantitative. You can grab a random handful of herb, pick out the seeds and stems, put some in a metal strainer or tea-ball and make yourself a shot of pale gold green dragon with a splash (or better yet, a spritz) of grain alcohol over it, into the shotglass. Then add about 1ml of that decoction to a glass or PETE vial and drop in 1 drop of 5% KOH in ethanol. Wiggle it to mix without splashing too much, and the intensity of purple color within the first 15 seconds can tell you approximately how much CBD is in there. Dark purple to black is high CBD. Deep purple transparent is probably normal industrial hemp or fan leaf trim. Pale violet to lavender is on the suspicious spectrum, but may just be a crappy handful. Mauve to pinkish or colorless is already extracted.
Pay no attention to the color changes that will often keep happening after that first 15 seconds.
It is always best to observe the material in random samples with a field scope to help confirm your beam test. Plump glands are plain great! Some shriveled glands and loose blobs of resin usually mean it’s just old. Lots of missing heads from decapitated hairs and a few shriveled empty shells mean it has been extracted already. Always try to find a dense little nug to break open carefully and compare to the rest of the “landscape”… plump heads in the nug and nowhere else is a dead giveaway of pre-extracted material. With practice, you can even tell how material was extracted… whether tumbled for dry sift, lower alcohols, or lower alkanes were used!
Indeed, it is always a good idea to perform more than 1 type of test, and usually to do at least 3 replicates of each! This gives you more than just the limited data type of a single test, and the minimum 3 points required to draw any meaningful straight line or trend across the data points. Two heads are usually better than one, but 2 different tests always are! With just 6 data points, you too can be a scientist! 
When big money is on the line, bring a GC, like the SRI model 420 with you. Learn how to use it. Keep it calibrated and treat it as gently as you can while traveling. NEVER touch or move the metal tube where the FID exhausts nor the clip attached to it! That is one thing that will completely obliterate your calibration on the SRI FIDs!
All of the small “fast” handheld or bench-top analyzers use near infrared (NIR) light and a lot of algorithmic “guessing” based on numerous models of the broad, indistinct humps it detects as highly convoluted peaks. They are decent for analyzing CBD & THC and okay for CBDa & THCa… but only ever those 4 compounds and only ever on cured or dried flowers and shake! Read that again, closely, because that is pretty much all they’re fairly reliable at doing! Certainly any I’ve found, anyway!
Regardless of what any of these companies may try to build a “strong algorithm” for, even “But we took over 15,000 known samples! It can’t be wrong!”, or whatever bullshit they want to spin, I can say I am already at least 96% certain that their models are woefully ill-prepared for all the differences in essential oils, absolutes, concretes, distillates, and somehow masterfully all the shittier for highly purified crystalline solids like THCa and CBD, no matter how they say to (pulverize, melt, dissolve it in some terps?) or how you try to prepare (mash, mix, melt, decarb, FUCK!) it for analysis!!! The goddamnable things will most often outright refuse to even recognize them as cannabinoids at all (they just barf some statistical error… they don’t even try to guess, ffs!), and even if they do see cadabinoids, they will tell you your white THCa powder is really 38.96% CBDV, 24.11% CBG, 53.85% CBN, 14.02% THCV, 11.26% THC, 31.01% CBD, 12.60% CBDa, 17.78% THCa, and rainbow crinkle stars of every cannabithing else the manufacturer ever read about! Of course it’s banging over 200%; it’s just that PURE, Brah!! And here’s an extra little fuck in the eye: biomass that has been extracted with any amount of an alkane (e.g. butane, hexane, or even the heptane in your “canna-denatured” ethanol) will read as if it has 3 to 12% CBD left in it, until you actually vacuum bake the biomass completely free of solvent! $25,000? Dicks in BOTH eyes and a turd on your doorstep! NOW we’re dabbin’ with GAS! 
Yeah!
Okay, I’m done. Apologies for the tirade!
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I’m new to this forum and love all the information you guys provide. My two cents on this topic is why don’t you guys just take some to a testing lab and let them run it. Here in Montana it’s only 50$ a test for potency it’s the pesticide test that’s expensive. 50$ is nothing when you’re looking at spending thousands on a decent amount of trim.
Jeezz
Its a tough thing to scale up. You cant send out to a lab when you’re transferring 700,000 lbs of biomass and the only way to be sure of what gets loaded is testing every load.
It astounds me sometimes how weve come to a system of paying per point/lb for product that isnt able to be 100% accounted for. Sure you can extrapolate after processing but a truly homogenized and accurate test up front, from what i know, isnt available.
I’m curious to see what direction the industry takes this issue, or maybe im over thinking it who knows.
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I’ve seen three week lead times near harvest…and 7days seems like the current “standard” here in OR. Sometimes that just doesn’t work.
Which is just one reason for getting in house testing early.
If you’re in the habit of purchasing questionable product from folks you don’t know, then having some flavor of mobile testing would seem to make sense.
It would only take 20min to run TLC on 1/2 dozen samples…and while I agree with @Photon_noir on the short comings of the FTIR solutions, they do have their place.
If you’re looking at laying down $$$ for what might be usable weed, having any method for discriminating it from swag/post-extraction/wrong major cannabinoid seems like a sound investment.
Edit: correction “Near IR” not “FTIR”. thanks @Photon_noir
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This made me giggle lol.
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Panda, eh? Very cute, Doc. FTIR is awesome, especially using an ATR module. Unfortunately, these NIR devices do not Fourier Transform Infrared signals into fingerprint peak spectra. They are entirely based on algorithmic approximations of near infrared “humps”, which is why they are so problematic. The model sets never seem to account for pure compounds, and our concentrate mixtures are so highly variable that models often fail to predict what their humps should look like! This results in limit errors for highly purified compounds (no result or wildly bastardized results) and numerous false positive results for mixtures. Biomass is the only relatively stable disposable chunk in mixture results, leaving a relatively narrow band from which to distinguish cannabinoids based on models… so it actually works, as long as no foreign material is present on the plant (like solvent residue, pesticides, too much non-plant detritus, etc.).
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Fourier?
I was abbreviating the other F-word you use when describing these devices 
thanks for the correction/reminder 
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The one that jumped at me last week drew blood when I tried restraining it…didn’t realize the consequences at the time 
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