How to make a Cannabis Concentrate at home, meant for edibles
How to make Cannabis Concentrate for edibles
The first step to making consistently dosed edibles that will reliably provide you the effect you’re looking for – is to make a concentrate by extracting the good stuff out of the buds.
Cannabis Extraction Methods
There are as many ways to extract the desired compounds from cannabis as there are ways to skin a cat. Which compounds qualify as “desired” compounds, depends entirely on your end goal.
How selective and of which compounds must we be in order to make shatter? How about THCa diamonds? What’s the best way to extract the good stuff in cannabis in order to make edibles?
Making a concentrate for smoking purposes can be difficult to do at home without expensive equipment and a bit of technical skill. However, when making concentrates with the end goal of making edibles, we can be much less selective about what we are extracting from the plant material.
In fact, the same chlorophyll and fats which would be intentionally kept out of smokable concentrates can be left in edible concentrates. Consuming chlorophyll even has health benefits!
In the following guide, we’ll walk through preparing a concentrate from flower or hashish material.
Next, read our guide on how to make Cannabis edibles at home which will teach you how to mix the concentrate made with a delivery system perfect for making edibles.
Ethanol as a solvent
Ethanol is a relatively safe solvent for use in making concentrates. Any residual ethanol found in the end concentrate is not harmful to consume meaning you aren’t risking your health.
Ethanol selectivity is very dependent upon temperatures. This means, that the colder you are able to perform the following extraction, the higher the purity of your end product. For example, if performed at -90C it is quite easy to get a yellow shatter concentrate with an incredibly high purity.
On the other hand, because edible concentrates don’t need such high selectivity, it is absolutely fine to perform this extraction at room temperature, resulting in a dark or even green-tinted concentrate.
What you need for the extraction
- 25g of very dry flower material or traditional hash/isolated hash
- 0,5 L of 95% ethanol (make sure it is not denatured, or isopropyl alcohol
- Cheese Cloth
- 1L glass beaker
- 1L glass jar with lid which is liquid tight
- 1 500mL+ silicone bowl or dish
How to make the cannabis concentrate
- Prepare flower material by grinding it thoroughly and placing it in the 1L glass jar. If working with hash, a microplane device can be useful for breaking it up.
- Prepare 1 square cheese cloth sheet, double layered, about 20-25cm2 should be plenty of material. This will be used as filters each double layered over each of the 1L glass beaker.
- Measure 500mL of ethanol, and pour it in the 1L glass jar which contains your flower material.
- Place the lid firmly on the jar, and shake vigorously for 5 minutes, and then sit for 5 min undisturbed. Every so often, it is a good idea to open the lid and allow any excess vapor to escape. If using hash material, you may want to repeat this 10 minute cycle multiple times.
- Pour plant matter and ethanol solution into the 1L glass beaker, with the prepared cheese cloth over the top of the beaker. Excess ethanol can be squeezed from the plant material using the cheese cloth in order to increase yields but diminishing potency of the end product. It is also an option perform a second wash of the plant material with fresh ethanol, if desired.
- Pour your filtered ethanol solution into the silicon bowl, and place it in front of a fan – blowing the evaporated ethanol out the window. A small vacuum chamber and vacuum pump can help to speed up this process, especially at the point that most of ethanol has already evaporated.
- Be sure that as much ethanol as possible has been removed from the concentrate. An oven set to 50ºC can drastically speed up the process without greatly degrading the material.
- Follow the steps in how to make Cannabis edibles at home! In order to take your concentrate to the next level and prepare it for mixing into any sort of plate or meal you can possibly imagine!
