tincupbb
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Thanks VEthyl acetate affects your central nervous system, respiratory system, eyes, and skin. It is a denaturant of ethanol used in industrial processes and I wouldn't even consider that option. Denaturants purposely make alcohol unsafe to consume. If you can't properly remove it to below 400 ppm you could hurt yourself. The food facilities using it have the proper equipment to remove all of it.
Isopropyl alcohol works well enough but pulls more waxes and pigments. It tends to leave a film on your crude extract and it is also not safe to consume its residue.
Ethanol is your safest bet. It is actually considered miscible in water, or basically very soluble. You can consume it safely at the residual level, and it doesn't target waxes and pigments as strongly as isopropyl alcohol.
I've spent the last 7 months heavily researching cryo-ethanol extraction for the hemp facility where I'm the production manager. I'll lay out a few pointers for you:
- Harvest, dry, and cure the buds just as you would if you were going to smoke them. Cool room, ~55% humidity, etc.
- Use the highest proof ethanol you can find, 190 is best.
- When you are ready to extract, pre-freeze your ethanol, buds, pyrex dishes, spatulas, etc. If it is part of the extraction process, it needs to be frozen. The colder you can do all of this then the less pigments and waxes you'll have reducing the final potency. You'll also retain more terpenes this way.
- Grind the frozen buds in a coffee grinder or nutribullet kind of blender. Do it just long enough to get them ground up, NOT powderized. More surface area = more efficient extraction. Do this as quickly as possible as the buds will pick up heat from being ground/chopped. Put them back in the freezer for a few hours.
- When doing the extraction have good ventilation. No open flames, sparks, etc. Have a fan blowing the air away from you. Do it outside if possible.
- Use about 3:1 ethanol:buds by volume. Any less ethanol and you might not extract all the oils, any more and you'll be wasting ethanol.
- Put the buds and alcohol in a container such as a half-gallon mason jar.
- Shake the hell out of it for about 5 minutes.
- Put it back in the freezer for about 10-15 minutes to soak.
- Pour this through your filter of choice, collecting it into some sort of pyrex dish (also pre-frozen).
- Evaporate the ethanol cold and slow so as not to lose those terpenes.
I know the extraction setup can vary wildly from what I've described. Feel free to give me more details on what your end product is going to be (edibles or smokeable oil) and I'll be glad to help more. If you're making edibles you'll need to heat/decarboxylate the oil before using it in food, if you're smoking it then your heat source will decarboxylate at the same time you're smoking it.
You do realise that ethyl acetate is rapidly metabolised (in the body) into Ethanol and acetic acid witch is then further metabolised and expelled. Woman using Nail polish remover (70-80% ethyl acetate) ingest notable amount daily. Unless you plan suicide and drink 100ml of nail polish, don't think you'll be in danger.Correct, but leaving enough ethanol in the final product to cause CNS damage is virtually impossible to do. You'd have to try to mess up that badly. Ethyl acetate could hurt you much more easily.
Think I get myself a Long Whiskey on the rocks and go figure this one out!!The acute toxicity being low means that it will more easily harm you.
Correct, but leaving enough ethanol in the final product to cause CNS damage is virtually impossible to do. You'd have to try to mess up that badly. Ethyl acetate could hurt you much more easily.
Would you mind going into detail on why you don't use iso?
Looking at the polarity of the solvents and their miscibility in water, Ethyl Acetate looks way better than both EtOH and Iso.Would you mind going into detail on why you don't use iso?
Thanks.do a first wash with buds you don't grind up, do it more like making BHO, pour it through the material, do not let the material sit in the solvent, slow evap this, it's so good.
Immediately pour that material out and dry as quickly as possible. Then grind and process as usual.
The other way will end up with a single thing much better than the second extraction but nothing that can touch what this makes the first run.
Even if you do the other method, that's way too much contact time with the solvent, and when you pour it through filters(I like chemex coffee carafes and filters for personal batchs) the moment it slows to a drip pour that into a new filter, repeat until you have filtered the whole thing.
I suppose you refer to dry buds (not fresh). I take it should be frozen (like for BHO).Thanks.
Do the first wash with what? (EtOH, ISO or Ethyl Acetate).
Thanks.
Do the first wash with what? (EtOH, ISO or Ethyl Acetate).
Isopropyl dissolves more fats and pigments than ethanol does. Fats and pigments reduce potency and make the smoke harsher. Not a huge deal with edibles as the target product but for smokeable oil it'll be noticeable. Isopropyl also tends to leave a film behind after it is evaporated. Ethanol is overall the safer and more efficient choice.
Regarding the use of a solvent on wet material-I'm new to growing Cannabis and with my first harvest (outdoor grow) 4-6 weeks away, I'm preparing for some sort of extraction and infusion of the final material.
I would like to extract some oil using the quick wash ethanol method.
Ethyl Acetate is used in the Food industry for extraction. I would use EtOH (Everclear), but not so easy to get hold of in South Africa.
Does anyone have any experience with Ethyl Acetate, or any comments?
Polarity and solubility wise it should be preferred to Ethanol (less polar and not readily soluble in water (8.3%)).
It seems that it is more difficult to obtain and more expensive than “EverClear” in some countries.
It will extract some chlorophyll from the plant material.
Another question on Extraction
If you extract dry cannabis material, the solvent penetrates the plant material and get into contact with the plant waxes and chlorophyll more easily.
If “wet” cannabis material (not dried) is used, and the solvent is less polar than ethanol and does not dissolve easily in water, surely the water inside the plant cells would prevent it from entering and getting to the wax and chlorophyll.
If we then accept that almost all of the cannabinoids and Terpenes are located in the trichomes on the epidermis of the plant, then an solvent would be able to extract these without having to enter the rest of the plant material, limiting the extraction of waxes and other undesirable compounds inside the cells (including chlorophyll).
What am I missing?
Any comments?
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