Greetings Steemers!
After a long weekend of processing cannabis oil, I thought I would give everyone a look at the process. I will eventually post tutorials but for today I just want to give everyone a peek at the process. So after we harvest and cure our flower, all we have to do is mash our material and we are ready to perform an extraction. This is what our prepped material looks like.
Not very glamorous I know. But this allows the alcohol to perform its task more efficiently than if whole flower were to be used.
Just another look at the material. So the next thing we do is soak the material in medical grade alcohol. This allows us to remove the beneficial properties from the plant and "store" them in the alcohol.
So this is our material after it has been agitated after completing its alcohol soak. Next begins the process of separating the plant material from the alcohol. We use many different levels of filtration to arrive at a "clean" final product.
Here we have our material in a large strainer which deposits into a large container.
Here I'm applying some pressure to squeeze out the alcohol that is inside the core of the plant material. After this process is complete, the majority of the plant material has been removed. I will then use a buchner funnel and a erlenmeyer flask to remove the finer particulate from the concentrate all the way down to 2 microns.
Once all the fine particulate is removed, we have a mixture of alcohol and the beneficial oils, cannabinoids, terpenes, and other beneficial constituents that occurred naturally within the plant that were removed from the plant material.
That mixture can be seen here. It is a very, very dark emerald green.
Now the alcohol needs to be removed from our mixture. This is achieved through distillation. This not only removes the alcohol but allows us to recollect it for future use. When all the alcohol is removed we are left with a very powerful CBD concentrate.
Now all that's left is for this to be drawn up into syringes for proper storage.
From here these will either be sold on the open market, or be infused into other products which will also go to market.
All that's left is for our label to be applied, and for this product to go on display either at our booth at an event, or for it to go on the shelf in a local retail store. For those interested in these products you can go here. This is a general overview of how one isolates cannabis oil from the raw plant material. I will post tutorials in the future as well as a look at the grow process. We only use industrial hemp that is very CBD rich, but these processes will work for any other cannabinoid rich plant that one seeks to extract from. Hope you enjoyed. Upvote and share!