Jason Showard walks listeners through an overview of the extraction, distillation, and crystallization processes used to take cannabis from cultivars to concentrates.
Episode Transcript:
Hello, and welcome to the modern extractor. I'm your host, Jason Showard. And I work professionally in the cannabis extraction field. After years of experimentation tens of thousands of dollars in lab tests to collect data from those experiments, and hundreds of thousands of pounds of biomass successfully extracted and distilled. I decided to spill my secrets to you with this podcast. The modern extractor will be focusing on the processes, equipment and science found inside a cannabis extraction laboratory. I've yet to find a curated collection of extraction knowledge, and that's exactly what I'm going to build here. I decided to produce this podcast because I kept looking for something like it to listen to, and it just didn't exist. In Season One, we'll be focusing on ethanol extraction and post processing and either distillate or isolate. The shows will be released in an order which follows the workflow of material through a lab. Each episode will dig deep into a particular stage in that workflow and discuss the various approaches with industry expert guests. In today's show, we'll be taking a bird's eye view of the entire ethanol extraction and post processing workflow. For the sake of simplicity, and getting through the whole process in one show, this will be a less technical overview of the full process. For this overview, I'll be following what I believe to be the best approach to ethanol extraction. in future episodes, we'll dig deeper into each of the stages and pick apart the different options and approaches a lot more technically, think of this as both a walk through the process and a syllabus for what lies ahead in season one.
So after this week's overview, next week, in Episode Two, we'll talk about sourcing biomass and prepping it for extraction. The first step in any extraction operation is getting your hands on good material to extract from. Obviously, the ideal situation is to get a sample of the material you're interested in buying, send it to a lab and have the seller agree to hold the material for you until the test results come back and tell you exactly how much of each cannabinoid is present before you buy it. But this is a fast moving field. And there may not always be time for a lab test. You don't want to miss out on a good opportunity. But you also don't want to get burned by buying bad material. We'll go over some tests that you can do to ensure you're buying high quality fresh material that hasn't already been processed. After you've sourced your biomass, it's time to prepare it for extraction. The first step in the preparation process is either milling, shredding or grinding your material. It's just not efficient to extract from biomass that hasn't been appropriately broken up. There's no magic spec when it comes to mill size and your decisions here should be based on variables specific to your extraction operation. And Episode Two, we'll go over how to determine your ideal mill size based on variables unique to you, such as your evaporation capacity, your cost of ethanol, because the biomass, your access to biomass, and the amount of demand there is for your finished goods. Once you determine what your mill size will be, there are a lot of options out there to mill grind or shred your material down to spec. After trying way too many options. I landed on Futurola shredders to do the job right. On next week's show we will have Bri Tolp from Futurola as a guest to discuss how Futurola shredders will get you to your desired mill size better than the competition. After your material has been milled down, it's time to bag it up for extraction. Most centrifuge manufacturers sell specially constructed nylon bags that zip shut and fit their centrifuges perfectly. Once filled, the bags of biomass should be held at...