I shook all trim (mixed strains, ZERO sprays on the t4). I’ve posted pics of my squishes on here in the past. I’d have to dig deep on my phone to find those pics. Granted flower presses yielded lighter rosin.
Di shook kief on a mirror using 120micron bags. Shake until you just see a color change, then stop. Fill 25 micron bags 7g full. Played set to 225*, lower press to just squish, hold 2 mins, squish at 75% power for 1 min, squish 90% power at 1min, raise plates, scoop. Enjoy
Depends on how the kief is handled first. I’ve had good results when I make sure to keep the heads from greasing by throwing them in the freezer in a mason jar ASAP. If the heads start to “grease” by melting and fusing together then yes, it will clog.
Doesnt apply that much for sjitty kief that dont melt Together in first place, with water my bags clogged do bad i only ridiculous little through agitating as crazy as i could
My was 160my dry ice outdoor kief shaked to bits
How did you manage/store the kief afterr you processed it?
Dry ice extracted kief generally picks up a good amount of water to due to condensation with really cold temps and a humid environment which can cause the kief to cake up (grese and dry) even with lots of contaminate (non dissolving weed matter). Did you look at the kief under microscope before extracting?
My point is that plant matter can always be separated from the tricomes if handled properly.
If your bags were getting clogged with intact trichomes then you need more stages with your filtration or they probably got warm and melted together somewhere in the process
yea decarbed rosin is definitely top notch meds
@Cazam564 i usually just throw some kief in with my trim(maybe 100g kief per kilo trim) and mix it up if I’m going to only do etoh soaks. definitely needs more filtration tho
there’s better uses for kief imo
Good to know. My boss has decided to not go ahead with my experiment for now, but I will see if I can’t push to see. I want to see if the Kief is oversaturating the Ethanol, and therefore all the THC in the plant matter is not being properly or wholly extracted. If it’s not really contributing much to the overall yield, then I want to see if we can eliminate it from the extraction process and maybe use it for something else.
What about pulling the terps from the kief? I have been wanting to throw kief in our small Co2 extractor to pull terps. Anyone have experience with this?
try Search results for 'kief co2' - Future4200
probably enough there to encourage the attempt…
I clean about 200-300grams kief with 1.5liter etho several washes 10+ until etho comes out clear, with kief sev dunks is key
Just use a big buchner and keep shutting the pump of and agitate it till slurry, turn pump on repeat. Beats using anything else, and the kief I’m using saturate the etho alot more, since it’s already good hash.
Unlikely. What is your current solvent to biomass ratio? (How many CUP-fulls into each keg)
With 10-12% CBD input, I could get 50lb (five 10lb runs) of material into (the same) 15gal of -40C solvent without losing extraction efficiency.
I’ve also extracted 18-20% thc input at ~5C and squeezed slightly more in (~1lb/liter).
The “kief” you’re dealing with is unlikely to be more than 40% cannabinoids, so worse case it’s like trying to extract 3 bags. If you’re using 15gal/bag then you should have no issues with saturation. If you’re doing four or five bags into the same 15gal, then you might be getting pretty close.
I would tend to agitate the kiefed bag a little longer, and if you’re running multiple bags into a keg, I would suggest one less bag when you’ve got the kiefed bag in the mix.
Send the post extraction biomass from your kiefed bag out for testing to see how much you’re leaving behind.
Adjust to taste.
So what we generally do is a double pass with the Ethanol. So we bring one bag of biomass in, put in 15-30 gallons of -40 Celsius Ethanol (depending on which machine) and do the agitation and spin dry. Then we bring a new bag of biomass and replace the old one, and run the same Ethanol from the previous run into the machine again for another agitation and spin dry.
I am going to check with our internal analytical lab about testing the Ethanol after it has been used to extract Kief to see how well the Extraction worked on that front, and I plan to look at the Kief bag itself, see if there are dry spots inside.
You could probably do three bags. Possibly four, depending on input potency.
I suggest you try it, as reducing your solvent cooling & recovery, even by 30%, is a big cost saver.
To get solid extraction efficiency in the 1lb/liter range, saving some virgin solvent back for a quick rinse (more on last bag, very little on first bag) is helpful.
So a few big questions that I haven’t been able to find online:
What is the saturation limit of Ethanol for THC? Is this even possible to measure without having to worry about Chlorophylls and other undesirables?
What is the solubility of THC/THCA in Ethanol as a Function of Temperature? Generally the solubility of solids changes as a function of temperature, and I was wondering what we would be looking at in this regard for THC and THCA.
These questions came up from my boss after I brought up the possible kief problem we could be having. The designers of the CUP machines recommended I not run the machine with a bag that is almost entirely kief due to the likelihood of harmonic vibrations and disturbances to the agitation and rotation as well as the fact that the kief is so densely packed that the Ethanol couldn’t get to all of it. The answers to these questions could allow me to push possible solutions through to test like:
Rosin Press to just press the Kief into a new product line
Collect all the Kief in a separate bag and then redistribute it among the CUP bags
Run multiple passes of Ethanol through the Kief in an attempt to get all of the cannabinoids
yeah, you’re not the first to seek those here. they might even be here somewhere, but I don’t recall running across them.
most of your assumptions seem on point, but I don’t believe you’re actually looking for the numbers you think you are…
it’s not really the solubility limit you need to worry about. it’s where the xxx liters of solvent (tincture) you leave behind contain enough of your target to require you go fetch them…and that really depends on your operating costs/efficiencies.
is it worth you time? then you cannot leave it behind… if it’s not, then keep moving…
you also want to get the cannabinoids out efficiently, and its seems reasonable to assume that as the cannabinoid content of your tincture increases it will be less inclined to pull more. while not at its absolute carrying capacity, functionally, it’s no longer as good as it was on the first or third bag. I saw a dramatic drop-off on bag 6 and 7 at -40C/CBD.
knowing how much solvent you’re leaving behind simply takes weighing the bags on the way out. my recollection for the CUP was on the order of 6lb gain on the CUP-30. which is coming up on a gallon of ethanol at 6.8lb/gal
knowing how the solubility changes with temp is helpful, but again, it’s not the whole picture, because of all the other things that come along for the ride as you raise the temp.
with the right post processing steps (see X-Spiral: Affordable Membrane Systems for the People!) you can extract warmer without giving too much thought to those issues.
if you’re considering that route, you might also want to rethink your solvent of choice.
Thanks for the info. I did end up finding a general solubility for both THC and THCA online, though obviously that should be taken with a grain of salt. And then it can easily be assumed that the solubility would obviously increase with temperature, though this would also bring through alot of plant matter and other crap we don’t particularly want.
I appreciate all the help with all this. I am currently putting together a document for my boss to answer his questions to the best of my ability and my research, and will try to sell him on a few solutions to the Kief problem. A favourite among my coworkers is a Rosin Press to make Rosin as another revenue stream. Thoughts on this?
Yeah, you need top shelf kief for this. I don’t believe you have even 50% kief based on how you’re coming by it. So I suspect you will be disappointed by the quality of the rosin, or will need to spend some time getting from “mill dust” to “squish worthy”.
Having seen hash rosin achieved commercially (didn’t seem viable) with a hair straightener, I don’t advise throwing much at your press. Finding someone making decent rosin and paying them to tell you your kief sucks might be appropriate.
I personally would just buy a used $5 hair straightener and test it myself, but I can see the boss not buying the results (your boss, not mine).
[actually I wouldn’t I’ve got presses laying around 
]
commercial scale rosin right here! i can press about 10lbs of bud in like 6 hours with it. Idk how much kief you could do but I’m assuming at least 3x that much. don’t expect it to be light colored unless you have the right strains and pulled it early tho… Solventless Rosin Press - TRP Stack and TRP | Triminator
That one with the double platters looks like a hella nice press!
man it’s the shit. i can press about a qp of bud at a time
It’s not that great by any means. I have one. I don’t use it.