Alcohol/Hexane wash:
"One way to clean up an alcohol extraction, is to reduce its volume to a manageable level given your resources, and pour it in a separatory funnel to about the one third level, followed by the same volume of n-Hexane and then of water.
We use an HPLC Reagent grade for this purpose, which we get from the local scientific supply store.
Shake well and then lift the lid long enough to burp any pressure, before setting it in a stand to stratify into layers. After it has separated, bleed off the water and emulsion layer. They contain both the undesirables, and the alcohol as well, with the cannabinoids left with the hexane.
Add water again and repeat the wash step until you are satisfied with the clarity, before evaporating off the hexane, to yield the pristine oil. More on hexane purging in the subsequent process description for serious scrubbing.
To put this process into perspective, I once collected all of my pipe bowl scrapings and roaches until I had about a pint of them, and dumped that into the container of black denatured alcohol, that I had been cleaning my pipes in.
I shook the mixture well and let it soak for a day to extract the material from the roaches and scrapings, before straining it through a wire strainer and then a coffee filter.
Because I didn’t want to mess up a separatory funnel with the black foul smelling mess, I poured the solution in a 1 gallon Ziploc bag, to which I added equal amounts of water and hexane.
After shaking it well, I hung it from one corner, to let it stratify, and after it had, I clipped off the lower corner of the Ziploc bag, and by pinching it, and controlling the bleed rate, I was able to bleed off the water, alcohol, and emulsion layer, so that only the now gold hexane solution remained.
I filtered the hexane and poured that into a Pyrex pie plate, which I blew air over with a fan to evaporate off. Attached are pictures of the amber oil that I extracted.
While the black color was gone, slight ashtray undertones could still be tasted, so further refining was necessary with activated charcoal, but we will cover that as a separate subject.
I am not suggesting this process for reclaiming ashtrays, but simply to make a point."
