Decoding The Holy Grail: Terpene & Cannabinoid Retention - Decarb to Extraction
Amy Gardner!
This is a No Sinking Hearts zone. If I understood your point, part of your problem is that your illness will not let you concentrate enough some days to pull it together. If that's so,, our hearts go out to you. I'm not sure how we can best help you but if we can, we will. It sounds like someone should be helping you make your meds. But if it's just a problem with remembering the basics -and our basics are pretty good- ask away, every day. Sue was on it. Someone will be on that knows the answer. And, we will ponder how to handle that summary.
Amy G,
Thanks for explaining where you are coming from. I don't know any more than the description of neuro-immune exhaustion that I just looked up.
My wife has had more than her share of physical problems combined with 10 years of every kind of pain medication on the market. She also has severe Restless Leg Syndrome. Climbing out of the fog of the opiates has increased the RLS. Damned if you do..... She is down to 7.5mg of morpheme and it does not want to turn loose of her.
The capsules I have been talking about are helping her with anxiety and have improved the amount and quality of her sleep. The dose she is on is ridiculously low. It is mostly non decarbed high CBD material with some decarbed high CBD material. It should have good anti inflammatory properties as well. It is about 70% CBDA (The non decarbed part) and 18% CBD (The decarbed part.) There is about 4% THCA, 3%THC, 3% CBGA and 1% CBC. Then I diluted it 100 to 1 with coco.
Now the short version of that, adding non decarbed material into your oil making may be worth trying for you.
Do you have someone to help with the physical work?
It may help others if you would let us know what is working for you and what has been disappointing.
Ask all the F*ing questions you want.
Best
Thanks both...
(If you want to just skip to my actual question- I bolded part of it below...)
Yes, sometimes I do need physical help - and sometimes I do have it. My helper needs my clear instructions tho, so I still need to be able to give them. Recently I've struggled to articulate it as there's as many methods as there are people making oil!
Mostly folks around here have said I just have to experiment and try out different ways and see how that goes, track the results etc. I realise that is what I have to do to an extent, but it's not always that easy if you're not fit & hale most of the time which, let's face it, is going to be the case for most medicinal oil users (especially at the times I need assistance to do it all, as you say). I've just ended up really confused, because - and bear with me here - there are number of advocated ways including;
- the decarb in oven first then infuse approach which most say to do for an hour @ 115ºC (sorry I'm Celsius
), then in the oil 2-8 hours (some use the MB machine which needs 8hours, others use a jar in the oven for various periods).
- Oldbear has a very simple method: crumbled bud in enough oil to cover it, in a jar with tinfoil over the top (and pin prick in the tinfoil) and 2hrs in the oven @104ºC.
- Then there was the covered in oil in a jar and 36hrs (shaking intermittently) at as low as the oven will go (this method made some strong night time meds from some high THC bud, but is in no way a practical option for me! And I think S'Sue doesn't advocate it anymore either).
Then I found this info a couple of months ago that talks about CBD requiring higher temps to decarb than THC (this is actually on a 420 thread from a few years ago but i found it while googling the question of decarb when I was overwhelmed by the forum options for pursuing the question, funny how that led me back to 420!). So this is based on a report by GW Pharma - and the only caveat that occurs to me is that it was connected to their work on CO2 extraction - so I'm not sure if the decarb info is relevant to oil making. Maybe it is.
... search finally led me to a British patent for a process of liquid CO2 extraction of resin from cannabis, in which they mentioned how they decarbed their samples and, most importantly, they documented the resulting lab analysis of 4 different amount of time and 3 different temperatures, and the differing results on THCa, THC, CBDa, CBD, and CBN. To me, this is a wealth of information. Here is a link to the patent:
Extraction of pharmaceutically active components from plant materials - GW Pharma Limited
The 3 temps are in Celsius and translate to Fahrenheit as follows: 105° C = 221° F, 120° C = 248° F, and 140° C = 284° F.
My takeaway from this long, very technical paper is the following 2 sentences:
Chemovar producing primarily CBD is 1 hour at 120° C. or 0.5 hour at 140° C.
Chemovar producing primarily THC to minimise CBN formation, is 1 to 2 hours at 105° C. or 1 hour at 120° C.
Translation: heat your cannabis in a 120° C (248° F) oven for an hour and you are good to go. Regardless of if your cannabis is high in THC or CBD this will work very well.
(For anyone interested, he goes on to describe what he did and then the results of the test he had done on the resulting product.)
So, with all of that info at my disposal, I came to make some oil about 6weeks ago and found myself very stumped as to what to actually do!
I have assumed that this was already background knowledge for everyone on here and on the other oilers threads so never brought it up, but I've just become more and more confused about the different recommendations and advice.
So this is where I am at.
I have 2:1 dry material (Critical+ CBD). The last batch I made using that was
maybe stronger in the THC department than I want. (I'll grow a higher CBD chemovar in the future but for now I need to get the most CBD out of these 2:1 buds I will have for a while.)
So my question, then, is the following: What would your recommendation for temp and time be, based on all the research you have done to date, for optimum CBD decarb where the THC component is not a high priority (meaning I'm happy to have the THC in 'a' form, or even as CBN actually)?
Likely the info has come by in this thread - but I've never been able to decipher the reports. I'm starting to realise that I've never piped up about it at all because it's a shock to my system that this is true, and I'm still in & out of denial about the impact on my cognitive abilities/capacity (it's an overload thing - I'm good to a point in time and then everything can fall apart, fast). I also haven't asked this here in this thread before because I had it in my head that it was all about terpenes... (looking at
the title of the thread, i can see i was mistaken there)...
Thanks Canyon for prompting me to try my questions again
FWIW - Oldbear made a spreadsheet, which looks brilliant, for folks tp use to help work out their dosing and get approximate ideas of the likely strength of your oil. I haven't been able to use it yet tho - I'm just getting spreadsheet software set up again on my Mac so hopefully soon, and hopefully I'll be able to use it (I used to
build spreadsheets, the other day I looked at one i had made for someone else and it was almost a mystery to me ).
