Hi all!
I have a few years of experience making extracts, mainly for dabbing. My preferred method as of now, given the materials I have, is to extract from plant material (buds if possible) using butane, and then mix with absolute ethanol for purging the butane and sometimes winterizing.
After a few unsuccessful trials, I have finally mastered the art of decarboxylating the extract in its final form, watching for CO2 bubble production to gauge the process. This has given me a wonderful orally active (and very potent) final product, which has already served people with chemotherapy pains, menstruation cramps, bronchitis, or desires to get high.
The thing is that I usually only do a one pass extraction with butane, so I am left with herb containing a decent amount of thc. I usually accumulate the weed from several batches and then make some cookies. Making cookies is boring, smells up the whole house, gives out a hard to measure product, and is just less exotic than making capsules, so I'm trying to find an efficient way to extract from the leftovers I have. Of course, dissolving the whole thing in ethanol would be safe and easy, but it costs about 40$/L where I live, so I'm thinking of using Methanol, which instead costs about 5$/L.
I know the byproducts of it's metabolism cause eye nerve damage, so I'm concerned about how to use it. My bet is that in a hypothetic scenario in which I had 200g of herb, I could dissolve the whole thing in 1L Methanol, let it dissolve for a couple of days (maybe even heat it?), then allow for open air evaporation, dissolve the product in 50 mL Ethanol, and then heat up in the controlled setup I use for decarboxylation, until all the ethanol is gone, and then a little bit more until decarboxylation is achieved.
This way I think I would get a pretty dark bad-looking goo full of chlorophyll, but since it would be used exclusively for orals I don't care about that right? If I'm not mistaken, evaporating the Ethanol at high temps (about 120C) would surely purge away the methanol completely, leaving me with a clean decarboxylated product.
Please I would love to hear your opinions. Is my reasoning flawed somehow? Will I cause irreversible eye nerve damage just by thinking about using methanol? Should I follow more like a QWET/QWISO protocol but just using Methanol instead of the usual solvents? Is the Ethanol step neccessary or I could just decarboxylate directly from the Methanol solution?
Thanks a lot! As always, icmag knows!
I have a few years of experience making extracts, mainly for dabbing. My preferred method as of now, given the materials I have, is to extract from plant material (buds if possible) using butane, and then mix with absolute ethanol for purging the butane and sometimes winterizing.
After a few unsuccessful trials, I have finally mastered the art of decarboxylating the extract in its final form, watching for CO2 bubble production to gauge the process. This has given me a wonderful orally active (and very potent) final product, which has already served people with chemotherapy pains, menstruation cramps, bronchitis, or desires to get high.
The thing is that I usually only do a one pass extraction with butane, so I am left with herb containing a decent amount of thc. I usually accumulate the weed from several batches and then make some cookies. Making cookies is boring, smells up the whole house, gives out a hard to measure product, and is just less exotic than making capsules, so I'm trying to find an efficient way to extract from the leftovers I have. Of course, dissolving the whole thing in ethanol would be safe and easy, but it costs about 40$/L where I live, so I'm thinking of using Methanol, which instead costs about 5$/L.
I know the byproducts of it's metabolism cause eye nerve damage, so I'm concerned about how to use it. My bet is that in a hypothetic scenario in which I had 200g of herb, I could dissolve the whole thing in 1L Methanol, let it dissolve for a couple of days (maybe even heat it?), then allow for open air evaporation, dissolve the product in 50 mL Ethanol, and then heat up in the controlled setup I use for decarboxylation, until all the ethanol is gone, and then a little bit more until decarboxylation is achieved.
This way I think I would get a pretty dark bad-looking goo full of chlorophyll, but since it would be used exclusively for orals I don't care about that right? If I'm not mistaken, evaporating the Ethanol at high temps (about 120C) would surely purge away the methanol completely, leaving me with a clean decarboxylated product.
Please I would love to hear your opinions. Is my reasoning flawed somehow? Will I cause irreversible eye nerve damage just by thinking about using methanol? Should I follow more like a QWET/QWISO protocol but just using Methanol instead of the usual solvents? Is the Ethanol step neccessary or I could just decarboxylate directly from the Methanol solution?
Thanks a lot! As always, icmag knows!
