Dry sifting

[DeadlyFruit]

Hi everyone, my name is deadlyfruit and I suck at making oil.

Not sure if there is a twelve step program for people with an oil making problem but if there was I’d be at the front of the line. I took my two washes, both looking like they would be a good start to this attempt at making oil and/or tincture. I loaded the golden first wash into my distiller and ran it at as low a temp as it would take and watched the condensed ethanol come out the spout. I thought I was stopping it when it was getting down near the bottom but still some ethanol left but it had already started to curdle up and go slightly milky. I says to myself: self, let’s not do that again, let’s go old school for the green second wash. I put both the remaining golden liquid from the distiller and the green second wash in two different Pyrex dishes and ran a fan over them. The golden was already part curdled (for lack of a better word) with a bit of what must be milky looking water in it and it evaporated down until there was just a golden residue on the Pyrex bottom with a few drops of water on top. The green second wash more or less did the same thing but without the milky looking water, some light curdling happening as it evaporated down. Now they are both just a hardened residue in the Pyrex dishes.

I believe I have two problems - the first is I can’t see inside the distiller without opening it up so it is hard to judge the timing and it also gets a bit too hot. The second is my ethanol isn’t strong enough. I took 76% ethanol (the strongest I can get here) and distilled it a few times until it measured somewhere between 88 and 91%. As strong as that is I think I now realize it has to be at least 95%(190 proof) but higher is better.

Can anyone suggest anything else I am doing wrong?

To rescue the situation I am going to take a razor and scrape the residue (not sure if heating it will make it harder or easier to work with) and then mix it in a small lidded jar with either more alcohol (for a tincture) or a bit of oil (for oil I can dispense in a dropper or syringe orally or into edibles). I am going to probably have to shake the heck out of it to get the residue back into solution. Will this do what I want? Should I do anything differently? Man it is frustrating - so far I’ve been able to do pretty much everything else I have tried to accomplish with cannabis, but making oil for some reason has never turned out how I’ve wanted. The tutorials seem easy but when I do it the wash doesn’t act the way I expect. Please help! 🙏

[Puglover1]

No distiller here which is why I want to press my best, Everclear gets expensive. Yes, you take a razor blade and scrape all that hardened concentrate then heat it to melt, hot water run over your container will usually do it. Or put your container in a mug of very hot tap water. Then you can add it to an oil, unless you want tongue-burning etoh tincture. Personally, I'd rather drink cooking oil or coconut oil tincture. Heck, I've just put some on top of gummies and ate it - oil, not alcohol. If it was mine I'd keep the two separate until you see how it goes. Can you buy that food grade alcohol that some folks order? Can't recall the name or source ATM, sorry. Not sure if it's your low % alcohol, I've only used EverClear. I'm finishing with the fan next time I wash, I have what I need to thin it and tiny Pyrex jars to reheat it. I need to pick up a few silicone jars. Did you use a heating mat under your Pyrex, or a metal pan of hot water underneath?

[Puglover1]

My understanding is that you reduce it with a fan to make it a thicker liquid, not shatter.

[DeadlyFruit]

True but by the point that the liquid starts to thicken the first wash was already in a curdled state rather than a homogeneous liquid and the second wash had begun to go curdled as well (there is probably a better descriptor than curdled but that is kind of what it looks like). I let it evaporate down to shatter/residue because it seemed like it would be that or trying to fish the globs out and having wax (like my last failed run). I am wondering if I let it get to the point that it starts to go curdled then lid it and shake periodically to try to keep it homogenous or if I just settle for wax and then reintroduce a little alcohol or oil, heat it slightly and shake it until it is homogeneous?

What %alcohol do you use, and do you stir/shake it at any point? Does yours ever seem like it is starting to curdle when you process it? Could it just be that I am trying to over-concentrate it and you folks stop while it is more liquid-y?

[Puglover1]

My pancreas can't handle alcohol, even one ml of tincture got to me. I use EverClear, 190 proof? The strongest EverClear is sold here in IL. I have only done the double boiler reduction, it ends up darker-looking like RSO but I did vape it. I stopped reducing while I could still pull it up into a syringe, never had curdles happen. I've done several washes, practiced on lesser quality bud. During my very cold extremely fast wash in February, halfway through reduction it was a beautiful yellow oil but I didn't have the pan, hot water, Pyrex and silpat ready to pour it into. Sad. That's why I still have a jar in the freezer with that same material waiting for a 2nd wash bc it was such a fast first wash, using some of my best buds. Melted wax Might stay liquid enough if your carrier oil is warm. Wax thinner uses such a small amount that it hardly adds to the volume or reduces the potency. When reintroducing concentrate into oil you need to whisk it a lot, add a little at a time until you get it all well incorporated. I've never shaken it, just stirred.

[DeadlyFruit]

Thanks puglover, really appreciate your input. I feel like I have a mental block on the subject but ultimately I think the largest problem is my ethanol is still not strong enough and that is making my purge act unpredictability. You are at 95% while I might get to barely 90% if I distill it a couple times first. It may not sound like a big difference but it is enough extra water that it causes a problem.

[DeadlyFruit]

Not to obsess on it too much, and for all those who haven’t gotten bored with my woes and moved on….

I took a close look at the little Pyrex dishes today and realized that it is not actually a hard residue (that happened a previous time) it is more of a super thick gel. This gives me some hope in that it is still an oil rather than shatter and it also looks more homogeneous than it did when it was actively being evaporated. I ordered a razor scraper and when it comes tomorrow I think I will add a few drops of alcohol and/or oil to loosen it and then scrape it into a dropper jar where I can top it to the desired level with oil or alcohol (still haven’t decided which). I can shake/swirl it until it is all in solution. I don’t want to count my chickens but getting something that looks remotely like it is supposed to Would be a great step forward.

[DeadlyFruit]

Some last thoughts for Puglover1 grouchyoldman and PeterMatanzas and then I will try to let it go 🙂

Once I realized I had a super thick oil rather than a hardened shatter-like residue (like last time) I decided I might be able to salvage the situation.

The Good: I added about a capful of alcohol to one Pyrex dish and about the same of canola oil to the other. I mixed them well and sucked them into 1ml syringes. Holy smokes I think I have about 10ml of oil and 10ml of tincture (the oil mix looks nicer than the alcohol mix)

The Bad: The dish with the oil mix (the greener second wash) had a couple larger size clumps of sticky dark stuff that didn’t want to mix into the oil. Since they were larger I could work around them and suck clump free oil into the syringes. The other dish (the golden first wash) had much smaller gritty looking clumps that didn’t want to completely mix into the alcohol so I had to suck them into the syringes in the tincture. They are fine enough that if you don’t look close it just looks cloudy. I am hoping it will go into solution over time. I ran out of syringes and still had some of the oil mixture with black clumpy stuff left so I decided to experiment by putting a half capful of ethanol in it as well as the canola and gave it a stir - the clumps went completely into solution, which didn’t happen with either just canola or just ethanol added. Maybe some possibilities there.

The Ugly: To be honest there is nothing ugly to report. I am ecstatic I was able to finally produce something close to an oil. I wish it were more of a clear high quality oil but this will do for now. I am looking forward to trying out the tincture sublingually, and I will probably use the oil in edibles. I think I could improve on it next time with stronger ethanol in the wash and not trying to purge so much ethanol with the distiller - it won’t heat up quite as much and I can finish it manually. Since I can’t get stronger ethanol I will recover about two thirds in the distiller and then under a fan with regular stirring to try for less clumping. I think the clumping may be plant lipids and other by-products rather than cannabinoids so it may not be a concern beyond how it looks but I would love it if it looked nice. Perhaps next time I will add a little of each.


Thanks so much for all your help as I tried to figure this out. If you have any final thoughts feel free to add.

[grouchyoldman]

Thanks for sharing your extraction journey with us DeadlyFruit. I've never concentrated all the way down to oil so your efforts have been very instructive. Despite the wrinkles it sounds like you've produced a potent tincture.

Your "Good, Bad & Ugly" summary made me smile, but I think you left out "The Sublime," that full body relaxation you'll feel when your homemade medicine goes to work!

[DeadlyFruit]

Thanks grouchy. I actually tried the tincture last night. I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to try as a first sample so I used a half ml…. Holy smokes that was potent stuff, I was well on my way to green-out territory when I decided sleep was probably a good option. Next time I will cut my dose back at least by half to .25ml. Brilliant stuff!

[PeterMatanzas]

I don't use carts so I'm not much help here. I'll take a chance and say those "clumps" are plant matter that didn't get filtered out. When you're creating the wash - what's your setup? How do you prepare the cannabis and prepare the alcohol before the wash?

Picture 1 is oil that's been sitting around for a couple months, the ethanol has evaporated so it's like glue. If I want it less viscous, that container can be moved to the warming pad on the stove (pictured) and heated at a low temperature. The warming temp will cause the glue like substance to melt down. Then I mix 1:1 of MCT oil in the warmed cannabis oil, add a drop of lecithin. The output is actually an infusion, not a tincture - the infused MCT oil is loaded into capsules (edibles).

When the oil comes out of the distiller it still has enough ethanol in it that I can pour it into the silicon cupcake baking liner. That cupcake liner (food grade silicon) is moved to the warming pad on the stove.

[DeadlyFruit]

Puglover1 I have a general ‘sense’ of how strong they should be but given I am using trim and popcorn there is a lot of guesswork involved. Also, since my oil making skills are a bit weak (but improving lately!) there is sometimes more waste than might be normal for others (this also is improving!). This all changes the calculation and without a handy lab it is hard to know (really wish we could just bring samples to a local lab for a reasonable price). From the top of my head I used the assumptions that 33g of trim and popcorn to be about 5-10% (call it 8% as the trim was high quality and mixed with a good portion of popcorn), my extraction to be about 80% efficient and the gummy cooking to again be 80% efficient (20% waste). These could be wrong but hopefully in the ballpark. With those assumptions, 33g = 33,000 mg. At 8% strength that becomes 2,640mg of thc. With an 80% efficiency on the extraction that reduces to 2,112mg and with 80% efficiency in the cooking step that reduces again to 1,690mg. Divide that into 30 gummies for a total of 56mg thc in each. One third of a gummy is 19mg thc. That amount is a definite buzz but still functional. That batch gave me 90 buzzed but functional doses.

With all that said, yep that first taste of a new batch is always a bit of an adventure 🙂. As for portioning one gummy, I just take a knife to it and weigh the portion. The mold is pretty large so I am not surprised. I am with you on the sweet tooth - one reason for making them weaker is so I can eat more!

I made two different batches, using a store bought gummy mix intended for cannabis for one and the GWE recipe for the other. One turned out extremely firm (stale gummy texture) while the other was closer to a fresh store bought gummy. I added a few drops of lecithin to the GWE recipe which is probably what made it so firm. I should have just followed the recipe more closely (and cooked it for less time and with less stirring).

[Puglover1]

DeadlyFruit Last year a gal used my kitchen to make gummies for herself and her disabled daughter, she bought 2 syringes of dispo RSO - THC & CBD strains. They worked for me. I still have all of her molds and such here, all I need is the oil. I can live w/o lecithin for now, I have Knox, Jello and I might make some condensed Kool-Aid to match the Jello's flavor. With dispensary edibles it takes 75-100 mg for me, I didn't realize you made Big gummies. She has small bear molds, leaf molds and one other, so 2 or 3 different sizes. Dispo was selling nice strain-specific cartridges of FSHO but I haven't seen any lately. Might have to buy some ice and finish off that once-washed jar of good bud in my freezer. I don't want to wait for sub-zero outdoor temps to arrive. Thanks.

[DeadlyFruit]

Puglover1 if you come across a good gummy recipe let me know. The two I tried were pretty good but always happy to learn some new tricks. If you want links to the recipe I followed and the mix I used for the second batch let me know. I should have mentioned my 86 year old mother who had never in her life tried cannabis asked to try my gummies. I gave her a tiny piece before bed and she said it made her sleep like a baby. She asked me to leave her with a few doses. If you’d ever met my mother you would know that her to trying cannabis goes in the win column.

My gummies are indeed pretty big. They are weed leaf molds I found on Amazon and they can contain gummies that weigh about 6-10 grams depending on how full you fill it. I figure my dose to get some effect but stay relatively functional is about 18mg but that is mostly based on the calculations I showed so they may not be accurate. I may be underestimating my tolerance lately. I will have to pickup some RSO from the dispo where the thc has been lab tested and try myself again to see how accurate my calculations seem.

[DeadlyFruit]

The two washes after evaporating under a fan and then warming them to increase liquidity

One of the washes after adding alcohol

The second wash after adding vegetable oil (first wash empty in background) - the larger clumps are visible

The syringes of tincture

[Puglover1]

Color in the syringe looks decent. You need some 25ml syringes me thinks. When you said Pyrex I thought you meant a small baking dish, not a little bowl. That's from two oz's? Decent capture. From all of my oil reading and research many said to put heat underneath while using the fan. Now I wanna get a bag of ice and try my leftover-for-a-second-wash jar from the freezer. But I have seeds to start first. Did you sample the green or the gold batch last night? How long until it kicked in? It's kind of late for me to make a firecracker. Glad you had success!!

[DeadlyFruit]

I decarbed about 66 grams of mixed trim and popcorn bud but I only used half of it because I wanted to see how it would turn out - this volume is from just 33 grams. Now that I think I can actually produce something usable I won’t wait so long before trying it again. Maybe I’ll do another run of oil this weekend when I make some cannabudder (I have piles of trim and ABV to use up). I have some larger syringes around but I couldn’t find them (I hate knowing I have something but not knowing where!) so I had to use the 1ml syringes. I am going to try to dishwash them when I am done and re-use them. I started out with a bigger Pyrex loaf pan but decided there might be less waste if it was in a smaller bowl. You should definitely run your leftovers through a second wash - I haven’t sampled the second wash yet for strength and taste but there was definitely extract there to work with.

Last night I tried the golden wash tincture. I used .5ml. I think it started kicking in around 20 or 30 minutes, so it was pretty quick onset. It was a gradual build from there but it eventually steamrolled me. I was at the point where I knew if I didn’t get into bed and go to sleep I would have to explain to everyone here that I was high AF. Seriously, I was absolutely blotto. Next time I am dialling back to .25ml. It was a fun trip but I wasn’t looking forward to explaining I was high to the point of being non-functional 🙂. I’m pretty sure I had an actual hangover this morning.

[Puglover1]

Use etoh to clean the syringes? I think a Pyrex pie plate, something more shallow, is what I'd use here. You can just put the oil in the center of the pan. One time I made firecrackers with ABV, my scale batts must've needed changing. Walking down the hallway to the bedroom at 3 a.m. was pretty trippy.

[Puglover1]

DeadlyFruit I was searching and re-reading. We may have subzero temps again in a week or so. I kind of like his idea, instead of the thick, sticky syringes of oil. "During my trials and tribulations of trying to get a decent pure cannabis oil (with nothing else added) I started doing something that I think would be more efficient for edible makers. Rather than making oil, sucking it into a syringe and then keeping that until you cook something I now make the QWET and keep that. When I am ready to cook I recover much of the ethanol but not quite all (to keep it easy to work with) and pour the remaining liquid into the pot/pan I am cooking in and do the final reduction to pure oil there. When it is done I just cook whatever I am cooking right in that same pot. Given I suck at making oil this takes away all of the guesswork and it is also more efficient because you don’t have the loss from trying to get all of the oil from the pan into the syringe and then the syringe into the next pan. There is also no ethanol or other oil to worry about. I made two killer batches of gummies last week this way that turned out really great." - What kind of oil did you use for those gummies?

Hey, I have the bottom of a big bag of trim from a year ago in the freezer, it was dried then frozen (with some popcorn that's already been used for butter, ran out of jars). It's rather fine, like dispo shake, do you have any tweaks for decarbing shake? I'm trying to empty my freezer somewhat, plan to use empty glass dispo jars from 1/8ths to measure out 3-4 ounces of EverClear for QWET. Less volume might get colder, faster, and that'd be one step done ahead of time, ready to pour. Those jars would be nice for storing un-reduced QWET.

[Puglover1]

DeadlyFruit Oh, to have two lbs sitting on a shelf, lol. I'd probably QWET a lot of it to store. My chest freezer is downstairs, the jug of EverClear that's been in my fridge-top freezer for probably 9 months takes up a lot of space. If I grew enough I'd QWET and freeze a bunch in hopes of affording etoh recovery eventually. My subzero chances were late night or I wasn't home at the time but I'm sure there's more ahead. I hear ya about left behinds, I'd rather rinse out my empty nug quart jars, then use that EC on the next one, until they're all cleaned and put away for now. That bit of EC would get used for washes. I have too many partial vape cartridges, vape pens that batteries died early but oil remains, o-rings full of oil, syringes with oil ... I might tilt & chill the carts whose tops I can remove and try to pull out the globs of oil, and put all the oily o-rings in a small container in the freezer then shake off all the hardened oil. Not desperation but trying to declutter, and I hate to throw away vape oil.

Decarbing the shake, I was going to use a cookie sheet and a parchment liner but wondered if it would take as long, it's been in the freezer for 9-10 months and went right from drying to freezer because I ran out of jars and lids, no jar curing. I bought some high % Bubba Fett shake that's like powder, never seen such fine shake from the dispo, waste of $. I figured the shake would be harder to filter. Maybe better to just make firecrackers with that Bubba disappointment and ghee or cooking oils with the less-fine shake that I grew.

I haven't made QWET since last year's extremely cold outdoor temps, it would've been perfection had I been prepared to finish it with air or a heating mat. I'm striving to match that batch while finishing it better. I could see half reducing a QWET then pouring it into silicone cupcake liners, stored in a covered container in the freezer until needed in a recipe. If there's heat in the recipe most of the remaining etoh should disappear, or it could be helped along. The half-reduced QWET might be stickier but in silicone in the freezer it shouldn't matter.

(I was just googling something, stumbled onto a Denver dispo menu ... I gotta get growing again!)

[grouchyoldman]

@puglover & @ Deadlyfruit, you guys have both got it right in that making a batch of strong QWET, say 20+ mg/ml, is a great target because from there you can store it nearly forever, and it is readily transmutable to everything from putting a little excitement in your morning coffee to baking brownies or taking it down to oil dabs.

I've been experimenting with adding a gram of freeze-dried bubble hash to an ounce of Everclear and having an instantaneous dropper bottle of potent tincture. I have yet to try soaking a bud in GD tincture then rolling it in keif. This is apparently all the rage with our crazy youth.

[Puglover1]

grouchyoldman I'd rather have it at the ready, and a good part of a grow stored in oil 6 months after curing. What happens when fire hits a bud soaked in green dragon then rolled in kief, I wonder? I imagine the etoh would evaporate but you never know what's trapped in the middle, lol. I wish I could tolerate GD tincture.