Firstly, I’ve used the search, have read a lot - sorry if this has topic has been beaten to death, but I haven’t quite found what I’m looking for.
Almost have enough tails collected to consider distilling them. We are not a high thruput producer, so I have some free time to do so. I’m wondering what to expect. Do you or have you ever redistilled collected tails fraction? I’m wondering what kind of yield to expect, what kind of disty color to expect, potency, etc.
From my reading, I’ve found this thread which is interesting:
Which has me wondering if I’d be better off doing some other steps prior to re distilling. LLE, scrubs, etc.
Also saw a thread where someone re distilled their tails with T41 in the flask to make d8. Which makes me wonder if distilling without T41 or some other clay in the flask results in a disty that would have too dark a color.
Is it “unsalvageable” in terms of cannabinoids because there are so few cannabionids in the fraction typically? I guess I should just homogenize and send a sample of my tails jar in for testing.
I’ve noticed that the portion of my main fraction that distills last (right before switching to tails) typically tests slightly higher in terms of potency and TAC. I know this because when I split my flask of mains in 2 to mix with 2 flavors of terps, the jar that has the top portion of the flask always tests higher.
I always found that odd, since it’s darker (more similar to tails color) which I figured would result in much lower potency.
10-40% is higher than most biomass used for crude. If it can be done for a reasonable cost and in a reasonable time I don’t see why it couldn’t potentially be worthwhile. I’m interested.
There was once a time not long ago where a lot of the current material being used was considered compost.
You can prob pull more out. Tails have some nasty burn semi molecular plastics in them at that point. If you remove it you’ll pop off more of the cleaner fraction.
Save and when you have 10-20 liters, itll be worth to clean it up with water washes and get a handful of free liters that would have been in the trash. Xmas bonus
Distilled 551g of combined tails and a few heads fractions the other day.
I ended up collecting 52g of heads, and 410g of mains. Didn’t collect tails. Left 87g in the boiling flask.
Seemed like a pretty normal distillation for the most part in terms of parameters. Collected mains at a vapor temp range of 177 to 186C and a mantle temp range of 205-210C and a vac range of 270-180 micron.
Will not have test results back until later this week.
Color wise, it didn’t help much. End product about as dark as it started. Here are some pics:
What do you guys mean by tails? Tails to me are the darker fraction after mains but still distillate. It seems like many are referring to waste as tails?
By tails I just mean the darker stuff that distills after the nice looking stuff. I switch to the tails fraction once the vapor temp starts to drop and the distillate drip really slows down (usually this is when my condenser starts to clog). Then I increase mantle temp and swap flasks to collect tails.
Got results back. 75% TAC 65% d9 THC. I never tested the combined tails before doing this 2nd pass. While the color doesn’t look much better, the smell is much less unpleasant.
it might be worth something.
