Bucudinkydow's Orange Dragon

Bucudinkydow;3659840 said:

Sorry for the delay. Still battling some complications from a medical procedure performed last Friday and not kicking quite as high as I'd like.

PROCEDURES FOR ORANGE DRAGON

Prepare app 7 grams of material of your choice. I choose to roughly cut buds with scissors. This arguably dissects the plant material fibers and allows an increase of chlorophyll, waxes and other yuckies that contribute to bad taste to leach out into the final product. Some prefer to roughly tear the buds by hand but I fear the precious sticky trichomes adhering to my fingers is a waste of cannabinods.

Time to decarb. In my opinion, there are entirely too many variables to be too anal about this step. Altitude, ambient temp, humidity, moisture content and age of your cannabis and a labyrinth of other factors can effect the perfect time/temp ratio. There are literally dozens of "perfect" decarb times and temps on the web, many substantiated by lab tests. Pick out the one your happy with and go with it.

A note of caution on decarbing in a sealed jar. Granny's ol' mason jar turns out to have insanely insulative properties. A co-conspirator working with me on this project placed an oven thermometer in the empty sealed jar and put it in a preheated oven. It took almost forty minutes before the inside of the jar met the oven temp. I placed the open jar and lid and ring in the oven during the preheat process. When it reached the target temp, I put the prepared cannabis material in the jar and sealed it as quickly as possible trying to avoid a drop in temp of the oven and jar. I then increased my normal 240 for 40 min to 250 for 45 min. This seemed to give a proper decarb. Next time, I'm considering placing an oven thermometer in the jar at the same time as the cannabis to get a better idea of what's going on. Of course, the thermometer will have to remain in the sealed jar through the freeze cycle until opening to add ethanol.

Remove your freshly decarbed material from the oven and allow it to cool for a while before placing it in the freezer. Make sure you don't open the jar!! In a separate jar, pour 3-4 oz of grain alcohol, everclear 190 is a good choice if it's available and place it in the freezer also. 151 ethanol or vodka will work also, just a bit less efficient in extraction. Leave both in the freezer for 24 hours shaking the jarred cannabis vigorously 2-3 times for a couple of minutes.

At the end of 24 hours, pour enough of your chilled everclear into the jar of cannabis to cover it by about 1/2", shake it vigorously for a couple of minutes and return it to the freezer for an additional 2 hours. This should have been the first time you've opened the jar since it initially went in at the beginning of the decarb process. At the end of the 2 hours, remove the cannabis/ethanol mixture from the freezer, shake it vigorously for a couple of minutes once again.

Now it's time to strain, filter and enjoy. Pour the mixture through a close mesh strainer removing as much of the tincture as possible with pressure. Seal the strained jar of tincture and let it set for about ten minutes at an angle if possible. This will allow the sediment to gather and make the next step go a little quicker. Pour the tincture through a paper coffee filter, gently, trying to not disturb the sediment. I normally repeat this last step a second time but that's at your option.

At this stage I normally do a reduction by naturally evaporating the ethanol but I suspect I'm experiencing a loss of molecularly volatile terpenes and will advise skipping this step and make dosage adjustments of the final product to find your sweet spot.

Ethanol extraction never reaches 100% efficiency so there are still goodies left in the used mash. I cap mine and place it in the freezer until my next extraction. Before getting started with your new tincture run, pour your virgin ethanol into your used mash, shake it a bit and strain it up. Use this, then, for your new tincture run.

This is an early beta test that has given pleasing results the few times it's been tried. I'm anxious for those who are interested to give it a try and share your objective experience. The process is a bit involved and reading back over this I question my comprehensive communicative skills. If clarification is neede, I pop in fairly often.

Good luck and enjoy.

BCDD

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