"Wash Down" process to lower amount of cannabinoid of flower

Butane is the answer you’re looking for, you can extract almost all the cannabinoids without breaking up the buds if you do a little extra soak, use nitrogen purge to push most of the butane out of the buds while still in the column and then the buds can be put in a vac oven at just above room temp to get the last little bits out. Just send me all the extracted cannabinoid byproduct for disposal.

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I’m sorry, but this sounds like a good way to poison :skull_and_crossbones: people with contaminated flower. This sounds like a way to create new epidemic, aka vitamin e oil in carts. None of the methods you mention sound healthy.

Nothing any more unhealthy about smoking post extraction buds compared to “untampered” buds, just a lot less exciting. If you wanted to know for sure you could have a residual solvent test before you sell the buds.

I agree with you, this is the reason of my message, not knowing the process to do it or replicate it, but rather understanidng the pros and cssn of each process , to know what to analyse, and finally to discuss this with local authorities to improve the situation (higher the THC barrer).

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it is a question of legislation.
Switzerland is 1% so many companies are make a lot of profit on this, their aim is the extract and the money rather then the final result of the flower. 80% of CBD’s Shop in Europe are not aware of this process but i can assure you thet 99% of the flowers below 0,2 in Europe are those unhealthy flowers, the rest is EU certified hemp (Kompolti) or CBG flowers. the point is not to say ok this situation sucks let’s leave this industry but rather how can i make things change. And the first point is to understand what you are talking about and as you can assume my knowledge is not deep enough now so i’m trying to learn.

Interesting :thinking:, I’ve never heard of these types of processes. I guess I’ll have to go read up some more, just to learn.

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Hi to all. New member here from Greece. As @hempers says this is happening a lot in Europe. 80% of the flowers sold are washed out. Mainly with Co2 according an Italian farmer.

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So what you are saying is that people over there run your biomass, they keep the extract, and give you the spent biomass? And you pay them for this service?

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^ I can see this guys head going “bro, wtf” haha

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Hi all,

So first of I would like to clarify a few things on the washing down process that is taking place in Switzerland if you think it’s bad, it’s barely the tip of the iceberg.

I’m an extraction specialist from NA and worked in Switzerland the last couple of years, I spent several years there in my youth going to school and thought it would be good to get some work done on the newly emerging Swiss and EU CBD market. After all, Switzerland is a nice country with high incomes and the mountains… oh oh oh… and the SWISS MADE… lol. 2 failed startups later and work in 3 different labs, let me tell you I’m a little bitter and pretty appalled with many things I witnessed and was by default part of, due to the services the structure I worked for was offering to their clients and products to customers.

Anybody in their right mind would NEVER buy “SWISS MADE” oils and tinctures, (mostly cheap USA or Alibaba distillate or isolate, mixed in a basement or bedroom with MCT oil they buy at the corner store, packaged in shit Alibaba packaging with a sticker… no masks, no gloves, do it with your cat by your side, and after going to the bathroom and not washing your hands… I witnessed that) or even distillate made in dirty meth lab looking setups… or even CRUDE extract!

Imagine getting delivered 100kg of crude containing over 10% of Pentane, brought to you in buckets where the plastic is literally being eaten away by the solvent, or same scenario with a quarter ton of crude extracted at room temperature with an obviously denatured butane propane mix, brought to you in 10kg white paint buckets, taped up… yes it was full of solvent and most the buckets popped and had crude spilled all over the place…

A book could probably be written about the dubious shit going on in Switzerland… Considering all it takes to get in the industry is your ID and 25k to open an ltd company… This is what happens when 0 to 400 cannabis companies open in a country of 8mil in a period of 90 days… maybe 10 of these companies knowing what they are doing.

Back to the flowers. Lowering the THC content and the way its done on flowers is completely fucked up.

1: Hexane
Submerge your nice flowers, loosely arranged in a big tub of hexane and place it in the freezer for 48 hours. Drain the hexane, get the oil back and recuperate the hexane, spread the flowers out on a drying rack, let the hexane evaporate. Leaves the flowers and trichomes looking quite intact, but gets a lot of terps out, when the flowers are dry, it isn’t rare that a terp mixture is sprayed back on top.
The result, usually for a V1 type at 0.9Thc and 20%+ CBD, the result is 0.12THC and Around 5% CBD left in the flowers. As the Hexane usually takes out a little Chlorophyll, the flowers look nice and light green too, making it easy to fool the client. Harlequin and V1 are usually the best picks for this as they each have a special attribute. V1 stays pungy and lighter green with more crystals, and Halequin has really nice big hairy buds, makes it easier to sell to customers.

2: Butane/ Propane
Loosely pack your flowers in the columns of the system (many use bogarts or some dodgy alibaba rig), make sure you just drop the buds inside and add no additional pressure to try to fit more in the column, keep the flowers intact. Then you do a “soft wash” where you make sure that you keep the solvent flow and pressure very low in the tube. After the run, the flowers are removed and aired out.

3: Skuffing
Though this doesn’t happen much anymore, some guys used to tumble their flowers lightly to get some trichomes out, this obviously didn’t work very well and damaged the flowers. (really I’m not joking)

4: UV Bathing
There were some mitigated results, but imagine my surprise when I walked into a room filled with tanning beds in a mountain town HAHAHAH. Each of the 10 tanning beds were filled with 1 Kg of flowers and he was litteray giving them a tan. He got some mitigated results but the place burned down before he got any real good results…

All the methods listed above are dangerous for the consumer, there are always solvent residuals in the flowers and you are just smoking a “vessel” without a soul in a way, a lot of the flowers extracted are washed down to a point where there is 0.01Thc and 1% CBD. When that happens, well, you take some of your Alibaba isolate, you mix it into your hexane, and you spray that on the flowers, let it evaporate. Absolutely foul. What you have to keep in mind is that companies will charge anywhere from 35 to 100chf (same as USD) per Kg for a lowering service. Here is the math for the sneaky swiss seller: 1kg indoor CBD for is 1200-1500chf in Swiss for bulk sale or brokers, sometimes even less.
1Kg Flowers: 1500.-
Lowering Service: 50.-
The sales price of 1kg nice looking indoor CBD flowers <0.2% Thc in Europe: 2 - 4000 Euros depending on the country.

Keep in mind that the Euro is higher than the Swiss Franc and that shipping costs are usually null as “Europe” is a 10min drive from there and there are no border checks, so they usually even just drive over the material with no customs tax, and sell the material with receipt in cash… Thats good enough for the Swiss accounting lol

The extraction companies or labs, well, they get a lot of free crude in a way from the people asking them to lower their flowers. But even with all this extra crude, from flowers… not industrial hemp… Most the guys still can’t make a proper product. Major health hazards and safety concerns everywhere there.

I’ve now left Swiss and work in a pharma group in Europe, where there is actual regulation, THC research and proper oversight. Best decision I’ve made since entering the Swiss CBD industry was to leave it, mind you nearly a quarter of a million poorer and with debts, but million % certain it was the best thing to do.

If you need SWISS MADE CBD stuff that is good quality, I can refer you to a few that I know personally for isolate, distillate or tinctures, just send me a dm and I’ll point you in the right direction.

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That is really terrible.

Maybe the laws should just change to allow thc then we wouldn’t behaving these situations

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It’s strange, I do feel a significant difference smoking something that’s less than .3 than something that’s closer to 1%… so I can see why they made the law.
But less than .2% is absurd and even .3 makes it close to impossible.

Thanks fo the detailed write up, R0z1n! And thanks Buddies for the question :slight_smile: I was also digging around to figure out how they do this, but wasn’t able to find anything. My hunch was that they must have some “Pringles” method to get to these ratios. Do you know what they do with their “kief / hash” to get it to 15-22% CBD and <0.2%THC?

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If CO2 washes off pestucides and other contaminants, then one thinks it could be a manditory process to clean the dirty flower before putting it on the market.

If your doing this,go CO2,instead of any other washer solvent that could bulid up residuals.

Otherwise pick a strain with 0.2 declared % and dont load it up with nutirents in flowering and you might just make a deecent flowr for the market

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These buds taste like utter shit though. We have them everywhere here. They claim to have different strains but it all tastes and smells like moldy ditchweed.

Hi R0z1n,
i see that you are knowladge person, can u give me an advise of which machine i should buy to have a thc remediation from the buds?

Hi kulbi how are you,

For a safe buy, also thinking about scalability and system reliability I would go with a system from entexs. They have great equipment, and out of all the systems I’ve seen operating, this one is simple and scalable.

did you read the thread? Homie is asking about lowering THC in flower, not extract

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Hey R0z1n I’m good thanks, what about you?

Thanks for the fast answer, I already made a video call with entexs company, I asked if they have some machine for flowers remediation. But they dont.
They working with biomass… i made a trial with Comerg, but the result was not fullfilling.

Principaly I’m not interested in the extract but in thc remediation from buds, i need to sell good looking flowers to European market lower then 0,2%
Do u know different solution?
Thanks again

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