HELP! How to concentrate 3 POUNDS of very low-potency weed

You’ve got the explanation here @xPat . You have a chance to salvage the whole endeavor, but you’re setting yourself up to do it halfway. Go the whole way.

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Typical freezers get down to -5F. There are some folks who buy a lab freezer (-20F) and hack the thermostat to get it to go down to -40.

The alcohol needs to be that cold to isolate the THC extraction from chlorophyll.

When I do a run for edibles I leave enough ethanol in the oil to facilitate handling it. Once it goes into hot coconut oil it evaporates all of the residual alcohol right away.

I take my first run oil down to the point it has to be removed from the crucible with a spatula so not much or any alcohol left. I use a dab tool to pull off enough to go in the banger and I smoke that.

Normally the oil I use for edibles is the second wash which is done at normal freezer temps. It will be very green with chlorophyll.

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Thanks! Once again, super helpful.

It feels like I really need to go “learn all about this”. You just mentioned a 2nd wash for the first time (that I noticed), and I didn’t realize there was a 2nd wash until you said that. And it happens at a different temp? Sounds like there’s more to learn… Looking at the tutorials on this site it looks like this subject matter is not covered. Is there a good place for me to go learn all about this? A link would be super helpful.

I see your point now on the temps. So instead of a freezer you are recommending a cooler (like you would take to the beach) full of dry ice to create a -40F chamber to cool the alcohol and weed. Is that right? I have a great big cooler - the biggest one they sell something like 120L. It would take a lot of dry ice but it is plenty big enough to hold several 1.7L glass jars which is about the biggest container I would be comfortable picking up and shaking when it’s full of -40F material.

Thanks again!!!

Ok, hold on… I thought this was straight in my head but now not so sure…

After re-reading this, it sounds like the main reason for -40F is to keep out chlorophyll because it might cause unpleasant taste to smoke/vape. Is that the only benefit of the super-low temp?

You say the stuff going to edibles gets washed with regular freezer temp. So what’s the downside if I just do both washes at freezer temp. Or just do one wash, since the weed I’m working with has so little THC to start with.

I can totally live with unpleasant TASTE. My situation right now is I live in a place where I can’t BUY anything. I can never grow again, so salvaging the THC out of this failed crop is my ONLY option. But I’m not looking for award-winning taste. Right now just to get high I need to vape about four vaporizer chambers of very weak weed. Frankly how it tastes is a luxury I’m just not that concerned with.

I can do the regular freezer QWET routine with equipment and materials already on hand. The dry ice would be a real trick. I’m in So. America and I barely speak Spanish and we’re on lockdown so you can’t even go out and buy dry ice without getting a police permit first. There’s a pretty big advantage to sticking to what I can do with equipment and supplies already on hand…

Thanks again
Pat

Yup.

Extractcraft lab: Google that and should give you plenty of information. They also have a Facebook page that is active.

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That and lipids and waxes you don’t want to smoke. Taken orally though there are a number of molecules that are supposed to be beneficial.

But why would you want to? If you do the QWET wash at -40F for 5 minutes it will give you a gorgeous oil that has a delicate fragrance and a kick like a thermonuclear device haha!

But if you don’t have access to dry ice then by all means run at higher temps. My first run was in my freezer which goes to -10F and was a decent finished product. You can remove much of the waxes/lipids/chlorophyll after the wash by filtering with a Buchner funnel and running through DE (diatomaceous earth) which will remove all of that crap.

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Because in my present circumstances bad taste is much easier to accept than the burden of having to get a police permit to buy dry ice in a foreign language during a pandemic lockdown.

The solution is clear: I’m going to do 60g of buds at freezer temp and see how that goes. That’s a very, very small percentage of my 1500g+ of weed. I’ll make that my first experiment, and improve on it in the next batch with colder temps and dry ice if my circumstances so allow. It will take lots and lots of batches to use up all the buds I have that are too weak to smoke.

I’m not expecting the oil to be kick-ass, and I don’t need it to be. The weed is so weak that you have to vape at least 3 or 4 separate Storz-Bickell dosing cartridges of weed just to get only moderately high, taking at least 5 full-breath drags on each cartridge, so 15 hits total on 3 cartridges, or 20 hits on 4 cartridges. So even concentrated I just want something that doesn’t take 20 minutes to smoke enough of to get high from it. That’s an exaggeration but that’s how it feels with this stuff.

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2 more questions:

  1. Several youtube vids on QWET describe de-carbing the weed by baking it in an oven at 240F for 45 minutes before freezing it to mix with alcohol. Their descriptions make it sound like this is a mandatory and important step before the wash, but you didn’t mention it. Are all these youtubers hooked on a myth about de-carbing being a necessary step, or are they proposing a different way of doing what that tool you mentioned did. Their way seems to require less equipment. What am I missing here?

  2. If my goal is to cook off all the alcohol and just have an oil, am I correct to assume ethanol is the best thing to wash with, rather than getting 190 proof grain alcohol? I’m a recovering alcoholic and not interested in drinking anything alcoholic so if I produce this with grain alcohol meant for drinking it’s just going to be burnt off anyway. I think Ethanol is something you can buy in a pharmacy, similar to isopropyl, is that right? We are under lockdown and we have groceries and pharmacy that can deliver to the house. For a liquor store we would have to get a police permit to travel and it’s a hassle.

Thanks again @Myfriendis410!!!

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Do it with whatever freezer you have, do it correctly and you will minimize the ‘bad’ taste. I did a run that turned out fine; there was some other junk in there but not much and it was pretty good. Doing a long wash is really for edibles.

If you have plant material reserved solely for edibles you can decarboxylate before doing a wash. If, like me, you do a ‘clean’ wash followed by a long soak before a second wash it’s not possible to decarb as it’s now wet with ethanol. So; decarb the oil afterwards. Always want to decarb for edibles. Either before or after.

That IS ethanol. Never use Isopropyl unless you want to get sick. The only time would be if extracting for topical application.

This is entirely dependent on how far you take the tincture down to. A lot of users of the Source have a second independent vacuum pump and chamber that they spread the oil out on a silicone mat and pull a vacuum on with a small amount of heat. That will take it to a taffy consistency with zero alcohol.

But if you’ve ever had a soda pop you’ve been drinking alcohol: there’s alcohol in all kinds of food products.

I have no philosophical (or other) objection to alcohol being present. I just don’t want to get drunk or even a mild alcohol effect combined with my cannabis. I want my experience to be about the THC, not the ETOH. But alcoholic weed extract is fine just like alcoholic vanilla extract.

My latest conclusions based on your comments:

  • Before I was thinking I will make this stuff and use some of it to vape and some of it to make edibles. I now realize that I should separate these projects completely. I will make something to vape using one process and something from which to make edibles probably using a different extraction process at a different time using a different batch of weed.

  • I will take a crawl-walk-run approach with this. If one “batch” is 60g of weed packed into a 2L glass jar, then I have enough weed for 25 batches. The first batch or two will be path of least resistance - what I can do with materials I have on hand without having to buy dry ice, etc. I can afford to sacrifice a few batches to an inferior process before learning to up my game and lower the temperature.

  • I now understand grain alcohol and ethanol are synonymous, and I assume a liquor store is the only place to buy this? Please confirm. I don’t think alcohol can be delivered because of age verification rules so if the ethanol is something I can get from a pharmacy or grocery store, those are much better because they deliver.

  • Please confirm I understand this correctly: If the intended use is vape, the oil should NOT be de-carbed before it goes in the vaporizer. But if the intended use is to bake edibles, then and only then a de-carb step becomes necessary, and it could be performed either on the flowers before the fact or on the oil after the fact. Specifically please confirm no de-carb step is needed if the intended use is vape.

  • RE: How far to take the tincture down to, I’m a huge fan of the Storz-Bickel dosing capsule system. They use a stainless steel mesh screen inside the capsule to vape liquids with, and you put the liquid in this steel wool like material inside the capsule. I’ve never used the liquid capsules - just the ones for crushed flower, but I have a set of them I can experiment with. Anyway my real point is I need to drop something onto steel wool like material and have it “soak in” in the sense of coating the steel strands so that more oil surface area is exposed to the flow of hot air through the capsule. You tell me how far to take the tincture down before it’s ready to drop into the steel wool material of the Storz-Bickel liquid vape dosing capsule system. I have no idea because I never tried vaping liquids before.

Thanks so much man! Your knowledge is incredibly helpful!!!

Pat

Not always, because at least in the US adulterants are sometimes added to ethanol. This is done to make the ethanol poisonous, and therefore exempt from liquor taxes.

This is a good point: denatured alcohol has an additive to make it bitter and undrinkable. Not suitable for extractions.

You can order (depending on state) online but in general a liquor store is where you buy it. You can NOT use anything less than 190 proof in the Source Turbo.

I don’t make vape carts so can’t really speak to whether decarb is necessary or not. I believe the element in the cartridge will heat and decarb the THC but should talk to someone that makes carts. Again; the Facebook page for the Source Turbo (Extractcraft lab) is your best bet for more detail.

I do two different runs with the same material: one light and full of terps and the other darker, full of chlorophyll, waxes and lipids that is decarb’ed and used for edibles. I also use trim for edibles specifically and decarb before extraction.

I think really you are making this harder than it is.

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I was excited when I ordered pure ethanol from Amazon, and it made no mention of adulterants. It arrived with adulterants. This was early-COVID19 days, and grain alcohol was in short supply.

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Probably true. The sudden and dramatic confrontation with building management and having to cut down the entire crop early was pretty traumatizing and I’m still licking my wounds.

My strong suspicion is that I have so little THC to start with that a 2nd run will not be practical, and therefore I’ll be using fresh raw material for my edibles runs.

The part I’m still struggling with is boiling off all that alcohol. Assume I have 25 runs to do in total where each run involves adding 1.5L of alcohol to an already-full-of-weed 2L jar. That means I would be producing 37.5 L or just over 10 GALLONS of tincture, ALL of which has to be boiled off to distill the oil down to something mostly alcohol-free. That’s a shitload of boiling alcohol. Remember, ODOR is what almost got us kicked out of the building. I can already imagine the building manager throwing a hissy fit thinking as soon as they shut down the grow op that I started distilling moonshine or something!

Thanks,
Pat

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Get a Source Turbo and a quart of Everclear and you’re good.

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Seems like 15 runs will take $600.00 in alcohol if a person has enough to buy a thousand bucks worth of alcohol the source turbo would definitely be the way to go. Not only will nobody smell the process it will be so much safer a boiling off that much alcohol is definitely a dangerous explosion hazard. The missus and I have discussed and agreed that we need the tool. Theres nobody within a half mile to smell it but the whole county would hear the explosion. I rather not explain the fire, the bomb or the weed to my insurance or the sherriff.
I’m loving this thread thanks for bringing it here for us all to learn from

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Ok guys, I get it now… First time @Myfriendis410 mentioned Source Turbo (sounds like open-source software) and extractcraft I didn’t realize it was a physical device. Just watched the vid and I get what it does now.

And I assume the “quart of Everclear and you’re good” was meant to emphasize that I can re-use the evaporated alcohol for the next run, and thus don’t have to waste all that alcohol.

Tried calling ExtractCraft to see if they will ship here, but it says the cellular phone number you dialed has been cut off. Will try e-mailing instead I guess.

Now that I see what it is, I agree completely @Myfriendis410: I can do the extracts in the freezer to make just ONE 1.5L batch of tincture, run that 1.5L as several runs thru the Source Turbo, then use the recovered alcohol to make the next batch of tincture.

Thanks again all!!!

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FUDGE! I’m dead in the water again, I think.

Chile strictly forbids alcohol over 110 proof. Can’t buy or import it. So Everclear or any other 190 proof alcoholic beverage is completely out of the question here.

I don’t know whether “Ethanol” not meant for drinking is available here, but it sounds like that was a bad idea to start with.

I just found this:

Looks to be for the intended purpose. 96% = 192 proof so good right?

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Is that 5,000 USD?

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I have a friend that makes moonshine and he took 20 cases of outdated beer from a bar that was going out of business and distilled into 190 proof just to see if it can be done. And it worked. So get the source turbo and use it to distill 110 proof to 190 proof and you’re all set. Seems a little extra work but is a workable solution. P.s. there is a wine from chile called a carmenere by casillero del Diablo that i absolutely love and buy it whenever our distributor gets some in. My wife and I have discussed going there to visit the winery.

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