Anyone having a problem with their hte w/ decarbed thca (thc) and it foaming up when you agitate it with heat. If injected at a lower temp it doesn’t react the same. Lately I have been warming up the jars and creating a bunch of the agitation, vacuum it out, and repeat. This has worked and also not worked. Has anyone else had this problem more than normal lately, or been having this problem when they didn’t prior? I have played and used plenty of terps before this, but not entirely at this scale. So, I never had a problem before. At first it was only a couple batches not really close to each other and I just dismissed it. Then it happened again, like three times in the last week and with a persy batch at home, too. Everything at work has been tested and is under 500ppm residual solvents, as well.
I wonder if this and the Medusa issue are related, or this has always been a thing. And I’m just experiencing it now, being at this scale of production. Which also isn’t very much either, in comparison to many.
So you go to stir up distille and hte for example and it expands hard on agitation? I heat disty to 70 c then pour it over room temp HTE and stir like crazy. Never really had it foam up even up to like 25% HTE.
The flip side is if I stop liquid diamonds early then heat it up for formulation and stir that it can definely expand quickly.
I literally ran buds dunked in zerotol yesterday at my normal location and everything poured completely normal. I even left it at 55 degrees over night to be sure and absolutely no quick crash at all. That theory from my perspective has no legs to stand on. I experience the issue daily at one spot and never at the other and the only difference is the solvent.
I have wondered if it was possibly not fully decarbed. I’m not using distillate in the ones giving me a problem, just decarbed thca. And the reintroduction of heat is pissing it off
I always have thca left in the HT. That’s never fully decarbed. It just randomly pops up and isn’t frequent enough to diagnose exactly what was different
In my experience some stuff just decarbs easier than other stuff. May have something to do with the different terpenes and how they can act as a solvent. Decarb is very difficult before all your solvent is out of solution in most cases
A good reminder to all is that your solution temp is the temp that truly matters. For example when decarbing something with say ethanol left in it it will not go above ethanols boiling point until the ethanol is evaporated. The heating device may say 120c, but that doesn’t mean your solution is anywhere near that temp.
I could see someone mistaking all the solvent being done as finishing decarb when the bubbles reside when in actuality the solvent is just finished evaporating and the solution isn’t at a high enough temp to start the decarb bubbles.
Not saying this is the issues but someone reading may find this helpful.
Is it cloudy/milky or just creating bubbles that offgas and expand?
I’ve seen partially decarboxylated THCa continue to expand and bubble at room temperature, likely due to tiny gas pockets trying to escape the stable THCa/THC mixture over the course of a few days to a week.
If it’s cloudy/milky I’d expect moisture or alcohol contamination - or some other polar impurity.
Medusa stones decarb fine for me , like normal THCa or sometimes a wee bit less pure.
