Does anyone have any experience with doing a terpene distillation of bubble hash? Or should it be pressed into rosin first?
The bubble hash comes from very nice trim, four washes of 15 minutes in the walk-in fridge. After freeze drying ended up with a 16.5% yield. This is 220u-25u bags so there is some small particulate however looks to be mainly trichome stalks and heads and a light tan color.
The idea is to load the bubble hash into the boiling flask and apply slight heat to melt everything down, terpene distillation up to 110 Celsius, dilute in ethanol, winterize, roto, cannabinoid distillation.
Am I just going to make a big mess? Should I just press the bubble hash into rosin first and then do the terpene distillation?
No but really, let me know how this comes out!! This seems so fucking cool, I think @3star_extraction and I were throwing around this idea (him mainly, all credit goes to him if he can gleam any useful info for you) but with the spent bags instead of the hash itself. Whatcha thinkin’ @3star_extraction ?
If it works out I have so many fucking second press bags (which not exactly the same as straight bubble but most are pretty saturated still) that I may want to give this a spin with
I mean if I think about it for a second, unless you have ultra-ultra-ultra pure bubble with no plant matter in it, maybe it would work better with pressed rosin? That way it does the heavy lifting in terms of filtration prior to getting into your nice expensive lab gear
I wouldnt go quite that hot, I would perform the distillation in stages and collect a few different terp fractions, using two to three cold traps at -80C or lower:
Fraction 1: Volatile terps
Vacuum: ~500,000 micron down to ~100,000 micron
Temp: Room temp up to 60C (or whatever temp it takes to melt it down)
Remove fraction 1 from the system and throw on some clean flasks for fraction 2
Fraction 2: Higher boiling and higher molecular weight terps
Vacuum: ~2000-3000micron
Temp: Up to 80C
This is by no means an SOP, just what I would try if I was doing it personally, keep us updated I am interested in your results no matter which method ya go for!
Don’t throw out your old bags for the love of baby Jesus. That’s free cannabinoids just sitting there. Save em up, we can wash em when I’m up there, and find a roto and spd to reclaim that shit
I would start as cold as you can. For me was room temp. Then I pulled as deep as I could then started working my ways up in temp slowly stopping at 55c
Hmmm… You’re on the right track. You should start heating at 80c and you could probably max out at 110c, pull vac thru your series of cold traps, attach an addition funnel with distilled water to the boiling flask and drip into the boiling flask, allow it to turn to vapor and carry the terps along with it. After you’re done stripping, ethanol wash would work well.
Thank you for including me in the conversation @SubstituteCreature . Absolutely you can treat rosin as non dercarbed crude in the flask and harvest terps. I would throw some water there to chase them out. But just because we can doesn’t always mean we should. If you see a 16.5% yield with ice there’s a good chance you will see a 22% yield with a more aggressive solvent. It all comes down to efficiency. Ethanol extraction is 50% less work with 25% more yields. The best use of sub par are unsalable rosin for me was was loading it in a half gram cart filling gun and filling 00 capsules. Now spent bags are different story they are rosin waste and deserve to be washed in solvent and turned into something else. I don’t do anything that doesn’t improve the value of the product.
Well the experiment will happen on Monday for research purposes but I believe that in the future I will just press the hash into rosin. It’s not too time consuming and you all bring up great points on filtering before getting to the expensive gear
I will probably press into rosin, do a Terp distillation on rosin. Then dilute in ethanol and add the rosin bags from the press for thc distillation
When I try to ask these questions to others in person I get more of a “well technically you CAN…I guess” which doesn’t seem to help in the thought process. It could be how I am articulating the questions to them, but man, I seriously feel so much better “chatting” with people on a damn forum then I do talking-to my own coworkers haha. Seriy,thank you everyone
This is an attempt to gather more crude for a THC distillation. We already do live rosin of course, and, I think, we do it pretty darn well
Ethanol soak would be the obvious solution however the 5L rotovap we have is already a bottle neck as we also make a wide variety of other products. Hopefully another rotovap will be coming soon
Since bubble hash/freeze dryer combo has much less consumables used besides ro water and parchment paper, this is our attempt at finding a different method of collecting crude. Obviously not as efficient as other methods, but could still be a viable route as there are some other benefits, like the turn around time as it’s a very short time from wash to testing!
That makes a little sense actually. It wouldn’t be hard to validate hash distillate if you count the expense and time involved in a cold bucket tech ethanol situation. If it where me I would beat devil out of the biomass in the wash, freeze dry extract but let the freeze dryer get back down to -40 before opening it up, have a bucket of ethanol in the freezer waiting and when ready sift the hash directly in the bucket, go straight from the bucket into a Buchner with 2 inches of diatomaceous earth, and two inches of alumina you can scoop the plant material and stalks out of the alumina to aide in filtration speed. Once filtered back in the freezer for a day and see if anything else falls out. Once filtered recover ethanol with a roto are short path decarb and distill. If it’s terps your after play with shelf temps on your freeze dryer. There’s a great conversation on here regarding the subject.
