This is where in-house analytics is the ace in the hole.
You should be testing your raffinate (post-extracted plant material) in order to dial in variables like solvent quantity and soak time. The only thing that will tell you for sure is what you’re leaving behind in the plant material.
Preach it!!
SRI-GC has a model configured explicitly for this industry with a list price of around $10k
Does a great job on potency, and a decent job on terpenes (liquid or headspace) & residual solvents.
The 310 MM is not set up explicitly for headspace, so “headspace terps” are qualitative rather than quantitative but the residual butane numbers are usable for guiding purging procedures.
We run frozen bud with lot of moisture.
Stated clearly in first post.
Frozen wet buds.
Asking questions good.
Reading also required.
Yes i see that fresh frozen bud slipped past me.
I was 6 gummies in when read lol
all depends on what end product you are trying to make.
sounds like live resin. IME, 8 min is plenty of soak time, especially with straight n-tane. We used to soak for like 5 min, which would leave a bit of cannabinoids behind (1-2% on the post-run material), but it never came out “too thin”.
To me, it being “too thin” means there’s still a bunch solvent left in there.
Warmer runs require shorter soak before undesirables start getting pulled and colder ones can go longer, as someone else said up there ^
If you want higher terpene content and potency, stick with a shorter soak. You want yield and don’t mind the fats/lipids, soak longer.
How could you demonstrate that there were (or were not) more “fats and waxes” than the previous batch?
Did your R&D guy confirm thusly?!?
I agree with this for n. I run isobutane for the most part and it helps to soak slightly longer with it ime
When running subzero, and especially fresh frozen, I do rinses with a higher solvent ratio. 8:1 - 10:1 instead of 6:1. I take into account the amount of time it takes my solvent to pass thru the column, and in a sense that’s what my soak time is, but the solvent is never sitting, always moving until the column is cleared.
Edit: with n-butane
so you don’t really soak at all? basically get the solvent in there and out right away? at a 10:1 ratio for fresh frozen, are you typically yielding around 5% (dry extract mass/biomass weight)?
5% is a great fresh frozen yield
Yep. I don’t do FF currently (don’t have the capacity to hold onto FF material), but back when I did the avg yield was 4%, saw a lot of 5% batches for sure.
I do extremely cold 8:1 runs on dry cured trim and only get back 1% or less on rerun.
I’ve noticed that potency is inversely correlated with soak time (longer soak decreased potency) but extraction efficiency (noids in vs. noids out) was the opposite (longer soak increased efficiency). Straight yield in weight of oil is a decent rule of thumb for surface level sanity checks, but isn’t that useful of a metric to look at.
Back when I was running a CBD processor, we would double soak our biomass. Once with zero soak time (just fill and immediately send to the recovery column) to make a high quality crude that was destined to become full spectrum distillate and CBDA crystals. The second soak was longer (8-10 minutes IIRC) to capture the remaining cannabinoids left behind. That crude was gross, but it was destined for bulk CBD isolate production so we didn’t exactly care.
Quick soak was regularly only 50% extraction efficiency, but crude regularly tested high-60%s Low-70%s.
Long soak would pull about 75%-80% of what was left in the biomass, but the crude only tested in the 50%s
Damn that’s awesome, and completeley different than how I am running. How cold were you running? Thanks!
Not entirely sure what temp I actually get down to, but I assume around -70c since I usually use dual inline coils in iso/dry ice bath.
awesome info, thank you for sharing.
Yeah i talked to the guy and he said our in house testing gave him like 15~20% of what is not cannabinoids or terpenes. He thinks it is fats and lipids or smth that we don’t want making it thinner. Also to clarify, we separate diamonds out so the liquid portion(calling it HTE high terpene extract) potency is at like 50-60% thc and 20+% terpene. Rest is something that we don’t know what it is. Thanks
Yeah i talked to the guy and he said our in house testing gave him like 15~20% of what is not cannabinoids or terpenes. He thinks it is fats and lipids or smth that we don’t want making it thinner.
Okay, so the HTE was tested for potency, but was it tested for residual solvent?
Yeah no residual solvent. everything was purged before testing
Yep. Still makes the question;
I’m mean guessing is all well and good, and knowing that you’ve got way more cannabinoids in your hte than most is certainly helpful, but the same simple test CBD isolate buyers use could actually confirm “fats & waxes”.
