In September 2017, I shared the story about my first cannabis garden harvest. Once I got all the buds and sugar leaves properly dried and cured, I weighed the material and this was my yield from the plants that I grew:
68.5 grams of Buds and 32.6 grams of sugar leaves
This was harvested from 3 plants that were also fertilized. In addition to the buds and leaves, I also produced about a 1,000 seeds. (Which was an interesting exercise in sorting, so that I could save them for future gardens or trade them. I can confirm that it was quite a laborious task to do by hand. I now fully appreciate why "cloning" to propagate the same strain and plant gender is less time consuming and makes sense to do if you want to keep growing the same strains all the time.)
I Used All 68.5 grams Of The Buds To Make A Fully Extracted Cannabis Oil
68.5 grams of buds, produced 6 ml of fully extracted cannabis oil or RSO (Rick Simpson Oil).
For those of you who may be new to the world of cannabis concentrates a fully extracted cannabis oil is basically the essential oil of cannabis which, when extracted, is a resin.
Here's what a mature cannabis flower (bud) looks like under 60 X magnification:
The essential oil of the cannabis plant (which is made up of cannabinoids, terpenes and flavinoids ) is produced in the spherical structures of the plant's trichomes which are called gland heads. It is the contents of these gland heads that I have extracted from the plant and produced a thick, oily resin from.
This resin is at approximately an 80% concentration level of whatever THC percentage, the original buds contained.
Pro-tip:
Smoking dried buds releases only about 20% of the potentially available medicine within the plant material. Smoking the herb, is by far, the least efficient use of this plant's medicine. However, smoking it is one of the fastest acting ingestion methods and it's most definitely the method that I would recommend for someone who suffers from severe post traumatic stress disorder, panic or anxiety attacks because it will instantly raise the anandamide (neurotransmitter) levels in the brain and stop the attack.
Of all the concentrates currently being made today, I would say that making a fully extracted cannabis oil is on the second rung of the cannabis concentrate ladder. I'd put most electronic vape juices fortified with THC containing oil on the bottom rung. Next, I'd place both Rosin and fully extracted cannabis oil, then shatter, then distillates which can reach up to 99.9% pure THC.
I'm Back Down On Rung #2 at 80% THC Concentration With MY Oil. Here's How I Did It:
- I put all 68.5 grams (of the bud that I broke up) into a seal-able stainless steel bowl and I pressure cooked it in a pressure cooker, with a gentle rock of its weight, for 40 minutes. This technique perfectly decarboxylates the buds.
(This is a video that I made for my YouTube channel called: Stir The Pot Cooking Supplies and I posted it on Nov. 22, 2016. It explains the entire pressure cooking decarboxylation process from start to finish.)
Pro-tip:
If you decarboxylate your buds in the beginning, your final fully extracted cannabis oil will already be fully activated which makes it completely pyscho-active and it can be eaten. Once eaten, it's 10 times stronger than if you smoke it. Technically, this little step takes us to a level closer to a 90% concentration when it's used as an edible. When people start medicating with this oil, it is generally recommended that a person start eating the equivalency of a portion size that is equal to the size of a grain of rice. If someone is using this medication to treat a Stage 4 cancer, they would work up to taking a daily amount equivalent in size to a nickle or 3 grams of oil.
This will give you a size reference. I would say that the glob of oil on the tip of the knife is representative of 3 grains of rice or, 3 individual doses. (
- This is what the broken buds looked like once they were fully decarbed.
- Then I put the buds into a 1.5 litre size glass mason jar and added 1.14 litres of 94% over-proof alcohol.
- I soaked the decarbed buds in the over-proof alcohol for 3 minutes. This is known as a "first wash". Due to the fact that you don't let the buds soak for more than 3 minutes during this wash, the concentrate is more of a golden yellow colour. If I let the buds soak longer, the alcohol would also start to pull the chlorophyll out of the plant producing a dark green oil which is still highly effective but doesn't taste as good.
- As I am concerned about extracting the contents of the gland heads, I rinsed my decarb bowl with some of the alcohol and added this to my soaking jar to make sure that I captured any gland heads that may have broken off during the decarbing process.
- You'll notice a few seeds that I missed when I sorted the seeds out of the buds. I just skimmed these off once they floated to the top of the alcohol and discarded them.
- I set a timer for 3 minutes and got another clean 1.5 litre size mason jar and a strainer ready to do the first filtre. Once I captured the plant material, I saved it and did a second wash with it. (The second wash is another procedure and I will show you this in Chapter 4.)
- This is the first rough filtre. You can see the soaked buds in the top of the strainer and the liquid alcohol mixture that contains the plants' cannabinoids, terpenes and flavinoids. It has literally transformed from a colourless alcohol to a brown, murky colour.
- I ran the brown, murky alcohol liquid through multiple coffee filtres. You'll notice the beautiful yellow colour of the liquid now. (It's gorgeous, if I don't say so myself.)
- This is the material that the coffee filtres were able to filtre out. I used 4 coffee filtres per glass jug and this is what the alcohol tincture looked like before I destilled the alcohol out of it by using a Green Oil Machine. (The Green Oil Machine is ultimately a big still that let's me reclaim a good portion of the alcohol that I used). Re-capturing the alcohol is important because it is very expensive. The 1.14 litre bottle that I used required a special license to buy. I had to apply for this license and the bottle itself cost just over $100 Canadian dollars.
- I then dumped all the alcohol tincture into the canister of the green oil machine.
- I put the machine on an elevated, but level platform and the alcohol bottle a little lower than the machine so that I could take advantage of gravity as I reclaimed the original 94% alcohol.
Pro-tip:
If you make sure that the Green Oil Machine or whatever you are using as a still, is level, then the alcohol will evapourate off evenly and the fully extracted cannabis oil that is left has less of a chance of scorching because it is being reduced evenly.
- Once the machine is set-up and the temperature reaches approximately 79 degrees Celsius, the alcohol will start to condense. I set the machine's temperature to about 100 degrees and once most of the alcohol was condensed off the temperature spiked to approximately 105 degrees.
- Once you observe a 5 degree spike in temperature most of the alcohol has been re-claimed.
It Is An Absolutely Fascinating Process To Watch The Colour Of The Liquid Transform From Golden Yellow Back to Being Crystal Clear
- I was able to re-claim approximately 3/4 quarters of the original bottle of alcohol that I used. The rest of it was taken up by the soaked buds, and the coffee filtres. I also made the decision to leave some of the alcohol in the fully extracted extracted cannabis oil so that I could easily and efficiently pour it out of the Green Oil Machine without wasting too much of it.
Pro-tip:
When the Green Oil Machine is still hot, open its lid away from you. There is a fair bit of steam that escapes when you first open it. This could easily burn a person if they aren't being careful. It is at this stage, that you could switch the machine back on and evapourate any remain alcohol out of the fully extracted cannabis oil but you will have to scrape the resin out with a straight razor blade from a utility knife.
- This is what the fully extracted cannabis oil looks like in the bottom of the machine.
- I poured this resin into a small glass jar.
- Then I continued to heat this oil on a coffee cup warmer for about 6 hours to evapourate any of the remaining alcohol off.
- I let it cool completely before I drew the oil up into a plastic syringe which is traditionally used to dose this oil medically. As mentioned early in this post, 68.5 grams of bud, produced 6 millilitres of finished concentrated oil.
Once the empty jar that held the concentrate is held up to the light, you can see the oil's beauty glittering in the sun.
As Far As I Am Concerned, This Oil Is Just Like Gold To Me
It's the culmination of the last 8 years of the working cannabis knowlegde that I have aquired and I cannot tell you how happy I am to share this with all of you and have this information, forever stored on the Steemit block chain.
That is power my friends.
Stayed tuned for Chapter 4, when I will demonstrate how to do a "second wash" using the buds again and adding in the sugar leaves.
If you missed the first 2 chapters, they can be found here:
https://steemit.com/cannabis/@rebeccaryan/it-s-easy-once-you-know-how-from-seed-to-mead-to-fully-extracted-cannabis-oil-chapter-one
https://steemit.com/cannabis/@rebeccaryan/from-seed-to-mead-to-fully-extracted-cannabis-oil-chapter-two
I welcome your comments and I invite you to follow me on my journey...there will be oil extractions. ;)
~ Rebecca Ryan