I washed my 2 ounces of Northern Lights that I decarbed yesterday today to try to get the cleanest golden honey clear colour I could with what I have around the house. First thing I put it in a big bowl and broke it up pretty finely and took out a lot of twigs.
Then I put the bud in a 32-ounce jar and filled two smaller jars with 16 ounces of 95% ethyl alcohol all afternoon.
I poured one of the 16-ounce jars of ethyl alcohol into the jar with the NL and let it soak for five minutes in the freezer agitating every 30 seconds pretty vigourously. I then gave it a quick strain using a regular food strainer.
I only let it drain for about two minutes and cut it off despite there was still a small stream because I want this to be just the purest stuff. I did not squeeze or strain the bud anymore after this but just added the other 16-ounce jar of alcohol to the bud I just strained in the big jar. I'm going to let that sit now for a full day before I strain it and squeeze everything out of the bud. So I'm going to have an extremely pure extract and a secondary pretty dirty one to compare.
At this point the extract is looking pretty cloudy and brownish. Not encouraging.
My first filtration step was through a 25 µm filter bag that I put inside a copper pipe for stability.
That seems to have made a fair improvement in both the colour and cloudiness.
Then I gave it two coffee filter filtrations. The first pass took about five minutes because the second half went down a lot slower as the filter picked up impurities. But the second filtration with a clean filter only took about 30 seconds so it seems the first got almost all of it.
That seems to have made a major difference in clarity. This is how clear it is in the bottom of a pan after two coffee filter filtrations. I couldn't be happier with that.
Out of 16 ounces I recovered 11 ounces which is only about 68.75% but I'm not worried about that because I didn't squeeze all the alcohol out of the bud on purpose because I want this sample to be clean so that loss will be collected in the second wash because I will squeeze out the bud after that one.
Maybe this will go all black once it gets concentrated I don't know but at this point, I'm optimistic that this may turn out to be a decent honey oil.
Even though the 25 µm filter bag helped a lot the real secret to a clear product it looks like is the coffee filter. I have read online that coffee filters are rated at about 20 µm but they seem to make a lot more difference than 5 µm would suggest.