SweetSue's Cannabis Oil Study Hall

SweetSue;3018352 said:

Fresh Harvest Olive Oil Extraction

I have a friend who's a walking, talking ball of pain. A lifetime of accidents and a military career have left him with layers of pain that'd send a lessor man of a bridge to end it all. I decided something needed to be done about that. When we think about using cannabis for pain relief our conditioning has been to go for a high THC strain, with the belief that getting high enough will remove you from the pain.

Well, a good CBD strain will do much more. This wonderful cannabinoid will reduce inflammation, release muscular tension to reduce muscle pain, relieve bone pain, stop internal muscle spasms, eliminate anxiety and release the symptoms of PTSD, among other benefits I haven't listed.

PsyCro developed a method to use freshly-harvested plant material to do an olive oil extraction that's tempted me from the first time I read his thread. Today I decided it was time to try it out. I'd just harvested my Med GOM 1.0 with a 2:1 ratio of CBD:THC.

I started out with 100 grams of plant material, washed.

I loosely chopped it up and dumped it into a jar big enough to hold it and be useful with an immersion blender. To this I added 1/2 cup of olive oil and began blending it all down.

I founf it impossible to get that much plant material into that small volume of oil, so I added another 1/2 cup and went back to work on it. Later I figured out that it might have worked with the smaller volume of olive oil had I started by adding small amounts of the bud to the oil and incorporating it bit by bit instead of beginjing with a full jar of plant material. Maybe someone else can give it a try to see if that works better for you. I won't have enough material on hand until my Dark Devil Auto comes down in about a week. I'll be turning her into this oil, using coconut oil instead.

It all went into a smaller jar that was placed in a hot oil bath for decarbing and extracting.

The first order of business is to boil off the water held in the plant material. That took about twenty minutes. I checked the temperature every five minutes. It won't start to really heat up until it's free of the water, but once that happens the temps ratchet up pretty quickly, so that five minute check workd out real well. I stirred this mix almost non-stop. It's not necessary to do that, but this was my first time through amid I was being a bit obsessive.

Once it hits 212 degrees F (100 degrees C) you set the timer for two hours.

Your baseline is 222 degrees F (105 degrees C). Keep it as close to this temperature as possible. You're going to cook it for two hours. This insures you get a complete extraction and complete decarb.

Decarboxylation bubbles.

At the end of two hours the whole shebang gets filtered.

PsyCro gave instructions on getting every last drop out using a hot water rinse and then separating the oil from the water. I attempted to do this, but the dregs weren't worth the effort IMHO, so I dumped it all and moved on.

It's so dark green it's almost black. Smells divine, although my daughter gagged at the smell. Maybe I'm smelling the healing potential. I like it. The taste leaves much to be desired, but the smell I could live with.

I added 1 tablespoon of liquid sunflower lecithin and mixed thoroughly.

It's chilling overnight to give the lecithin time to bond to the oils. Tomorrow morning it'll get made into capsules and my friend can walk around in less pain. That'd be a good thing. That'd be a very good thing.

Tomorrow I'll know how many capsules I got out of it and can do a best guesstimate on the dose per. I'm coming to the opinion that figuring out the exact doses is slightly insane with cannabis. If you have to limit THC, I can see needing to know basic loads, but this isn't a pharmaceutical drug with side effects we need to be concerned with. I'm disconcerted that we're attempting to treat cannabis like a pharmaceutical drug. I suppose if you're marketing medicinal products and have the equipment to give you precise measurements that's what should be expected, but for the average citizen making their oils at home, without lab testing, you'll drive yourself nuts. Follow the recipies that work for you and listen to your body. It'll tell you when you have the dose right.

Or am I the only one of us who feels this way?

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