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@ Soloma,
Have you succeeded in making your spagyric tincture? Also, look into the chemistry of spagyrics a little. There could be something going on with CBDA and THCA (organic acids in general) being neutralized by the basic salts contained in the ash. I have tried 2 methods of extracting under vacuum to ensure no decarb occurs
High Heat Extraction
Low Heat Extraction
You can really see how most of the other acids of other cannabinoids disappear with high heat, along with THC. In this case the CBD content was probably higher due to a hot extraction.
I am getting GC reports soon on the difference between a low temp extraction and a low temp spagyric. Spagyric preparation is definitely the way to go. Make sure you get a good burn and I would encourage you to purified your mineral salts and crystalize them.
Decarbing Frank's Gift Cannabis
I've been searching for a reliable way to decarboxylate medical cannabis for a while now, and there seems to be no consensus as to exactly how to do it. Different websites and forums all have a different take on the best temperature to use, how long to heat it, how to prepare it etc. My 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. So I did just that (sort of) and then had the cannabis analyzed at OG Analytical in Eugene, OR. Here is what I did, the lab analysis of cured Frank's Gift bud, and the decarbed Frank's Gift bud.
In the patent, they say it is preferable to dry the herb at a lower temp, then decarb it at a higher temp, but since I had put a pizza stone in the oven to try for a more even temp, I dried it and decarbed it at the same temp.
5/10/16 I started with 36 g total; removed 1.124 g for analytical lab testing. That left @35 g before removing stems, @ 34 g after removing .9 g of stems.
9:00 AM I put a 16" pizza stone (9.5 lbs./4.3 Kilograms) in the oven and preheated to 250° F. I used a Farberware oven probe (laying on the pizza stone) to get an accurate temperature. It showed that it took @ 90 minutes to get up to temp.
I was aiming for a temp of 250° F, but since my oven fluctuates about 20° F, I could not achieve this. After almost 3 hours of screwing around with the oven, turning the temperature dial up and down, trying to get it to a stable temp, I gave up, and settled on a setting of 245° F.
I broke up the buds into small pieces (it was very sticky), put it on an aluminum baking sheet, and put it in the oven at 11:45AM. I left it in the oven for 20 minutes to dry completely. It was not sticky at all after drying it. I crumbled up the buds in my hand (very easy) and wound up with mostly powdered bud.
I returned the baking sheet to the oven and waited until the oven probe said 250° F, which took about 15 minutes. I left it in the oven for another hour, removed it, let it cool down a little, and weighed it. It now weighed 28 g, so it lost about 6 g of moisture (17.6%). I took out 1.15 g for the lab. Here are the lab results:
Before Decarbing
THCa = 4.8%
Δ9-THC = 0.9%
CBDa = 9.9%
CBD = 0.6%
CBN = <0.1%
After Decarbing
THCa = <0.1%
Δ9-THC = 4.8%
CBDa = <0.1%
CBD = 9.1%
CBN = 0.2%
I am thrilled with the results – all of the THCa got converted to THC, all the CBDa got converted to CBD, and very little of the THC got degraded to CBN. Not too shabby.
Next time I wouldn't mess with the oven temp. I would just set it at 245° F and leave it alone.
If you look at Table 5 in the patent, you'll see that there is quite a bit of leeway in time before the THC starts to seriously degrade into CBN, so leaving it in the oven for 1-2 hours at 250° F would not degrade very much THC (4.1% after 1 hour and 6.7% after 2 hours).
Miscellaneous notes: Franks Gift organically grown outdoors, harvested on 10/4/15, dried in 50% humidity, 70° F temp for 5 days (stems snapped at that point), then placed in 2 quart canning jars with a 62% Boveda pack for curing. It has been in the jar for 7 months.
I hope this is helpful.
Jackson