Guidance needed for VERY large scale QWISO/QWET

Brent Harper said:

Hello all!

I am seeking some guidance for making some oil out of a few hundred pounds of trim and inferior bud I have from my latest harvest. My end goal is to turn it into something that I can load in to my e-cigg and sell it as e-juice. I have a fairly large budget and I'm in a legal state, so if you have suggestions, please don't hesitate to comment.

Here is my idea so far:

I was going to do an ethanol extraction. If someone can convince me to use isopropyl, I'm all ears. I was planning on getting 95% ethanol and not 99% because I heard that the 99% turns to 95% quickly after it come in contact with the air, so it's better to save the money and buy the 95%.

-Place trim and ethanol in the freezer for 1 or 2 days. (maybe use dry ice somehow, idk)
-I would do a 30 second ethanol wash in some sterile 5 gallon buckets with my trim in some bubble hash bags.
-do 2nd ethanol wash in a separate bucket to get as many cannabinoids out of the plant as possible.
-discard plant material.
-filter alcohol/THC solution. (I think my best bet here is to purchase a scientific #1 filter with a vacuum on it so I don't spend all day waiting for it to drip thru coffee filters.)

Here, I'm a bit lost as what to do. My instincts are telling me to distill the alcohol from the oil, so I can reuse the alcohol. I've done this on a small scale before, and it took a very long time. I'd rather not spend $42,000 on Eden Lab's vacuum distiller. So my idea currently is to buy several small distillers and have them running constantly. I could definitely use some advise here.

You can get up to a 5 liter boiling flask on a Heidolph rotary evaporator. Our Heidolph came from [email protected]. If he isn't close, he can direct you to the correct person closest to you.

So now I'd have my greenish/brownish liquidy THC oil and chlorophyll and fats and whatnot. I would then reintroduce a bit of ethanol and stick it in the freezer until it got as cold as possible to solidify and separate the fats and waxes from the oil. Maybe incorporate dry ice at this stage also, although I don't know how I'd do that yet. I would then run it thru a filter again. I'm unsure if a vacuum filter would be necessary or not.

I suggest you winterize before boiling it down the first time. Ethanol isn't prone to pick up a bunch of non polar fats, lipids, and waxes, but if you choose to winterize, just filter the extract to get the chunks out, and stick it directly in the freezer. 48 hours later, pull it out, vacuum filter it, and reduce it down then.

If the product still has a lot of chlorophyll, I might do a hexane/brine rinse with a speratory funnel. I don't like the idea of adding hexane, but if I do, I would probably have to purge it with more ethanol. Skunk Pharma said to do 3 rinses, so that's probably what I'd do.

You can sun (UV) bleach the chlorophyll some, and I usually save hexane separation and wash as a last resort. A faw, faw, better thang to avoid the undesirables in the first place.

I'm not exactly sure how to purge the remaining ethanol from that solution. I want to preserve the terps as much as possible, so I don't want to heat it as much. Perhaps I could use a more simple vacuum distiller for the final purge. With this type of distiller, I could use a very precise hot plate/oil bath combo
to distill the alcohol, leaving the terps in tact.

You've already lost a goodly percent of your monoterpenes and will find them in your recovered alcohol, which is now a gin.

After rotovape or still, if you simply spread the syrup in a large flat dish in a thin film and set on about a 125F heat mat, covered with a cloth to keep dust away, most of the rest of the alcohol will leave through natural evaporation. Any that you leave behind isn't toxic and will add a sweet taste.

So, after that, I almost have my final product. From here, I would mix it with EJ mix (from what I read, I can get away with 2:1 oil:EJ mix) and then inject it in to disposable cartridges and then I would have my final product.

Please Roll it Up, I need your help before I go and dump a whole bunch of money! I promise to keep you all updated with my farm, and process!

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