My buddy been having issues with red residue showing up afte CO2 extraction and winterization. To me it looks like water solubles or oxidization of some sort but I can't tell for sure. Hopefully not some sor t of biofilm.
Background: CO2 extraction, method been running over two years but just recently started to see red color. He is not set up the way he needs to be due to funds so everything is not ideal.
After extraction, he winterizes in Food grade ethanol for 24 hours in a -20 C freezer. Filters off plant fats and waxes with buchner funnel and vacuum assist however this process is way too slow in my opinion and can take an hour or a few hours to filter the entire batch.
Red residue is being found in the bottles after winterizing and pouring into the funnel apparatus. I noticed as well during one run in which I found a little bit of red on the funnel itself and several holes clogged with plant waxes telling me, the filter let loose at some point or broke and some waxes etc were being sucked through.
Hes been using the same HDPE bottles for two years only wiping them out with regenerated ethanol before storing, I thought possible a biofilm was building up, not sure if it could survive in ethanol though so I’m leaning towards oxidization or water solubles. Furthermore, this color has been found in extraction of CBD and THC based strains so it does not appear to be colors from strains specifically. Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks.
We used to get this with strains from a particular grow. One tech thought it was high levels of tannins that got extracted. In my opinion, the red is oxidation from highly reactive compounds that are present in certain strains. Just keep running 24hr winterization/filtration cycles until it does not show up. Never experienced any issues from this so it may be a non-issue.
If you are having trouble with winterization times, try adding more ethanol to thin out the cakes and also filter less material per filter paper and it will go way faster.
I just started working with a CO2 system pulling terps off hemp. We are more so in the R&D stage right now. But we’ve had a few runs recently that left behind a very obvious red color on the extractor vessel walls, looks to be the same shade of red that you’re seeing. And we cannot figure out what the hell it is. Hopefully there will be some answers here!
In my experience that residue seems to be strain specific. Seen it many times using the same exact parameters but not all the time. Have not made any correlations between the appearance of that residue and end product quality yet.
My first thought was potential tannans etc. but we have seen this from several different strains and sometimes in one and not in the next. Leads me to believe that it is oxidization or water soluble impurities. We are going to try to re winterize and re filter. Cheers.
Had that before with C02 that deep red color. A simple warm carbon scrub and some silica sand cleaned it right up. I have a hochstrom . What I would do was use a 1 micron filter in hochstrom. 600 to 800 ml of silica and 1200 to 1600 ml of ethanol. Blend together until silica is cloudy in ethanol. Then pour into the hochstrom. Mix and pour quickly otherwise the silica settles at the bottom of the beaker and cakes up in the mixing beaker. Once you’ve poured the mixture into hochstrom. Turn on the vac and quickly open vac valve. You should end up with a nice solid flat cake in hochstrom. To avoid making a hole through the silica and getting the red trough the filter without passing through the silica I would get a 20 micron filter and lay it on top of the silica cake. Then pour the crude and wait for filtration. Comes out very clean. (also I used a 20 micron filter to lay on the silica cake so that the crude passes through the filter faster. Otherwise it takes more time for the crude to pass through two 1 micron filter papers)…
