BobCajun
Well-Known Member
Sounds impossible but not so. You can simply add a bunch of distilled water to dilute the alcohol to less than 50%, the more diluted the better, probably try for more like 20% or less for optimal recovery. A white emulsion forms. Add pure salt, like "kosher salt", and mix. I've read you need about 6% salt in there but a bit more or less probably wouldn't hurt. Then you wait for the solution to look clearer and the extract to precipitate out as a beige slime. You use a glass bowl for this because it's going to stick to the sides. Cooling it usually helps to get it to clump up onto the bowl.
So anyway you wait until you're satisfied that it's mostly stuck to the bowl, however long that may take, overnight in the fridge or whatever, and pour off the liquid into another glass container to sit for longer and see if anymore comes out onto the sides of that container. I just leave the first bowl sitting out overnight so the extract will dry on the bowl, since it's pretty well dispersed as it is. I then simply scrape it off with a razor blade. Maybe a flat bottom glass dish would be easier to scrape than a bowl, unless you have a flexible blade, I just used the bowl myself. If it still crackles when heated then it needs more drying time, like on some parchment paper (pure paper so moisture passes through) or by heating until the fast bubbling stops.
The whole point of this is to avoid alcohol vapor, which stinks like hell, and also because alcohol evaps slowly and will take fucking forever, plus the evaping will cause cooling which will cause water to condense and the extract will be wet anyway so might as well just flood it with water and be done with it. Either way, you'll have to dry off the moisture.
Another thing you can do using this methodology is to clean up the extract, by adding the water in small amounts at a time. As it gets more dilute, like 80% or so, crud will precip out before THCA/THC. By removing that crud before diluting the alcohol a lot more, you make the extract more potent and less dirty so to speak. I never actually did that, just preciped everything at once, but others could try it. Could also try just doing the extraction with less than 99% alcohol and seeing which concentration produces the best product. Then it's a single precip step involved, which could be messy otherwise, trying to separate out the preciped crud. Probably wouldn't filter that great, just gum up the filter.
So anyway you wait until you're satisfied that it's mostly stuck to the bowl, however long that may take, overnight in the fridge or whatever, and pour off the liquid into another glass container to sit for longer and see if anymore comes out onto the sides of that container. I just leave the first bowl sitting out overnight so the extract will dry on the bowl, since it's pretty well dispersed as it is. I then simply scrape it off with a razor blade. Maybe a flat bottom glass dish would be easier to scrape than a bowl, unless you have a flexible blade, I just used the bowl myself. If it still crackles when heated then it needs more drying time, like on some parchment paper (pure paper so moisture passes through) or by heating until the fast bubbling stops.
The whole point of this is to avoid alcohol vapor, which stinks like hell, and also because alcohol evaps slowly and will take fucking forever, plus the evaping will cause cooling which will cause water to condense and the extract will be wet anyway so might as well just flood it with water and be done with it. Either way, you'll have to dry off the moisture.
Another thing you can do using this methodology is to clean up the extract, by adding the water in small amounts at a time. As it gets more dilute, like 80% or so, crud will precip out before THCA/THC. By removing that crud before diluting the alcohol a lot more, you make the extract more potent and less dirty so to speak. I never actually did that, just preciped everything at once, but others could try it. Could also try just doing the extraction with less than 99% alcohol and seeing which concentration produces the best product. Then it's a single precip step involved, which could be messy otherwise, trying to separate out the preciped crud. Probably wouldn't filter that great, just gum up the filter.
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. i want to get away from using ISO. Anyway, I also bought a large separatory funnel and was going to try that "salt out" method but would love to see it done first hand before I screw up a run.