Hi Friends,
Happy to see so many of you are having success with GD. Let's see if I can answer a few questions and help you get even better results.
1. Increase the Amount of Ethanol for a Better Extraction
It occurred to me that maybe I could improve the extraction efficiency by using a larger volume of solvent (the ethanol). Think about dissolving salt in water, if you use a larger volume of water you can dissolve more salt before the solution becomes saturated and the salt falls out. Shouldn't the same properties apply to cannaboids in ethanol? So for my most recent batch, I started with 3oz of Everclear instead of the 2oz of rum (a 50% increase in volume as well as a more pure ethanol). After extracting for 20 minutes I had 2oz of GD remaining instead of the normal 1oz.
If my previous extraction method was perfectly efficient, you would predict that the new GD would only be half as strong as the old GD since the same amount of cannaboids were now dissolved in 2oz instead of 1oz. Happily, the new GD was almost as strong as the old GD. This means that by increasing the amount of solvent (ethanol) for my extraction, I was able to extract more cannaboids (goodies).
Thus, it is okay (probably even preferable) to use more ethanol for your extraction as this seems to improve the efficiency of the extraction. It would be great if someone with a good deal of GD experience should test this out (how about you OKSmoky).
2. Boiling Temperature
Ethanol boils at 172°F. It is really hard to make the temperature go above 172 without doing something really dangerous. Just use the water bath, let the ethanol boil, and it should stay right on 170°F-172°F. Relax, float downstream—if it is boiling, you are doing fine.
3. Green Tea
Following up on the idea of Green Beer (aka Dragon Tail Ale for you microbrew fans), I have invented Green Tea. Put your dropper or two of GD into a nice cup of your favorite tea, add honey if you like, and sip away. Have a tea party. Personally I prefer a nice black tea like Darjeeling (and I like calling black tea green tea). It hits slower than Green Beer, but faster than a dropper alone. BTW—this also means you can now make lollipops or other happy confections.
4. Boiling Off the Alcohol
If it looks like you have boiled off too much of the alcohol, you can probably just add more. If you were to boil off all the ethanol you would probably be left with some sort of resin (hmmm). The THC should not evaporate unless the temperature goes over 380°F (vaporization point of THC) if the solvent evaporates.
5. Non—what do we do with you?- You must follow the directions.
- Don't be high when you do this.
- Don't ever put the ethanol in the oven—BOOM!
- Bud NOT schwag.
- Have a friend help you. Preferably someone who did pretty good in chemistry class.
Master Wu
the Alchemist