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“Introduction to the Witch Herbal Extractor

Cannabis Oil Using Ethanol

Video One of Nine”

It’s Anthony at Rainier Distillers, going through a new still. It’s called the Weed Witch. We’re going to be extracting the resin / the oil from cannabis. It doesn’t only just remove the oils and plant materials from this plant; you can take the oils from lavender, lemon rind…. anything that holds an oil, this will do it. We’re going to do an absolute, which is going to from a concrete absolute using an alcohol extraction or ethyl alcohol. Again, you can use any of the solvents you’d like. It’s solvent to solvent, they have to be purged after. And some solvents are worse than others. We’re using an ethyl alcohol.

Plant material: we’re using sugarleaf, 5.5oz, we’ll see how much we can get in these, and then one and a half, maybe 1.7oz of a bud here we’re going to break down into small sizes so that it can more easily interact with the ethyl alcohol.

We’re going to be doing a [chilling] here. It’s going to be in the deep freezer. One’s going [to be] plant material, and then we’re going to plug it, pour our ethyl alcohol in here. Of course, you first freeze [both] the units, the plant material, and the alcohol for at least 12 – 24 hours. Once you’ve done that, then cap it off, put your plant material in here (chilled 12 – 24 hours), put your ethyl alcohol in here fairly quickly, cap it, make sure there are no leaks, and then you can stick that right in the freezer and let it sit for as long you want. I don’t want to give any advice, just do it by trial and error. I would say every to take it out of the freezer and give it a quick shake every 5 to 10 minutes, then put it back in there. When you think it’s done, you can take it off, undo the caps (which I’ll show you), and the plant material will come out.

Other than that, the next one is going to be the chilled plant material, and running the ethyl alcohol through the plant material into a catchment, which I’ll show you. Most of the parts I’ll be using here comes with the sale of the still. It’s called the Weed Witch through Rainier Distillers.

Let’s have some fun!

We’re going to go through everything here. There’s going to be about 3 different distillation processes and you just choose which one is going to work for you: the first being using the freezing, chilling everything. The next one’s going to be a Rick Simpson oil. So when you’ve done most of this work and removed most of the good oils (well, everything’s good), then you can do the last extraction through a Rick Simpson process or a heated distillation process, which we’ll go through.

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PT 2:

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We’re going to go through the second part, where we’re going to put our freezing plant material in the actual glass tubes. One of them will be filled with ethyl alcohol and one clamped up, put in the freezer again. Anyway, we’re just going to go through it and we’ll just take it from there, so bear with me.

[puts on gloves]

Just checking to see what material’s which, don’t get them mixed up. First one we’re going to do is going to be the shake, or sugarleaf. Displaying screen gasket: This is going to be the filter that will come with the unit. Cap, clamp. Tighten it down: the tighter it gets, the more it shrinks.

What I’m going to get here is a bit of alfoil — you guys call it aluminum foil — just so the plant material doesn’t come out when I put it in the freezer. I don’t want to mess up the freezer. So there we have it, turn that around.

Puts on funnel: this comes with the unit. We grab the plant material, this is the sugarleaf, and we’re just going to be pouring it in here like so. And how much is in here? About 1 ½ or 1 ¾ ounces. Anyway. You can pack these as many as you want. Fill the whole freezer, 30 or 40 of these all ready to go! And yes, I’ll be putting these into the freezer.

This is going to be number two. Puts on caps/clamps. This one is going to be filled with our solvent. The solvent we’re going to be using here is red wine, distilled and taken to about 95% alcohol. So that’s all ready to go. I suppose you’re all wondering what kind of temperatures I’m using? The colder the better. Again, this is 1 ½ oz. As you can see, didn’t fill it all the way up, so you could probably get 2 or 3 oz of bud depending on the density of the material.

What we’re going to do now is place the ethyl alcohol in here, which is going to be quite cold. [For safety] you should really do this with at least a couple of people, but it can be done alone.

Pours in ethyl alcohol. 6:09

You can sit this as long as you want. You want to keep everything super cold, you don’t want the chlorophylls coming through, you want to to keep everything tied up. The quicker you do the this the better. How much alcohol did I use? Probably around a quart.

As you can see, there’s a little bit of plant material in there.  Putting on cap and clamp.Again, this is where doing this with two people would be handy. Like I say, multiple of these would be much more simple, because you would just doing this one time. Tighten everything down, give it a shake, and then it goes back in the freezer. You can do this every 5-10 minutes for as long as you want — play with it, take notes. We’ll come back once these are all frozen and take it from there.

OK guys, we’re going to empty the alcohol out of the glass vessels [into the pot]. First one we’re going to do is the one with the liquid. So there we have it — pretty damn cold!Removing clamp and gasket. Taking off the gasket, we’re going to replace it just to take most of the plant material out so it doesn’t fill up our filter in here. This why you need two people, to help you put these units on.

What we’ll do is turn this upside down and do our first extraction. Again, you can do as many of these and you’d like– fill them up in the freezer and have them going. For those of you who love making absolutes and extracting oils, I could be doing this with lavender, lemon, lime, oregano, anything. Any plant material. Now we’re going to tip this in here. Pouring tube contents into pot and places tube onto the rack.  And what we’re going to do now is extract the remainder of the product that’s in there. Removes other clamp and gasket on top of tube while the plant material is still draining into the pot. As that’s draining, I’m going to pour some more alcohol in there that is already been chilling. Again, have two people doing this: one holding it while the other is pouring.

The preference of how much ethyl alcohol you use — you’re not going to lose any ehtyl alcochol because you’re reclaiming 98.5% of it, so it doesn’t cost you anything. Very cheap, you can just keep reusing the same alcohol over and over. I’m just going to be pouring this in, and that usually gets rid of a lot of the material that we didn’t get before. And how many you do of these is totally up to you; I’m going to give it one more flush. Again, it’s up to you — you can actually refill it again, put the caps on, put back in the freezer, and shake it again. There are so many ways to approach this, and I’ll leave that up to you guys.

This method I’m doing right now, I’d be doing just with the bud. You can do it with sugarleaf too, of course, but predominately the bud. It’s got the higher concencrates of the triclones. As that’s draining there, we’re going to get the other one ready and we’ll take it from there.

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PT 3:

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Just to show you the clarity of what we just did, the extraction really hasn’t taken any of the chlorophyll. I don’t know if you can see the clarity of that, but it’s actually quite good. There are particles floating in it, but that can be removed in filtration and whatnot, but I’m just showing you the basics here. So that’s the first style of extraction, if you have some really good plant material. That’s still dripping so you could probably do this once, twice, and get some more out of it, but we’re not going to do that now.

So what we’re going to do is go to the next one. Displaying tube full of material: There we have it, our gasket and our screen is on the bottom there. Places tube on put, puts funnel on top. We’re just going to be pouring this alcohol through the plant material. Again, this would be safer with an extra person. And as with any solvent extraction, cold or not-cold: no flames anywhere, no one smoking, just be sensible. Even static electricity can be a problem.

Pours in alcohol.

So there we have it, it’s coming out quite clear. And how much do I put through this? Again, because I recover almost everything I use, you can be very liberal with the solvent you use, this one being ethyl alcohol.

After this, we’re going to be extract the material. So the amount of alcohol use is probably about a gallon and a half. There we have it– everything is pre-chilled, we’re not getting any chlorophyll coming through. Filtration is a definite. There are different ways of doing that, but you can do that with coffee filters, or whatever it may be.

Adds more alcohol to tubes.

We’re just going to pour this through and we’ll filter at a later stage.

After we finish these guys off, there are two other extractions. One dealing with temperature change, going to 172+, heating up the ethyl alcohol into a vapor, running it through the plant material, which will extract all the material out of here. The third is the Rick Simpson extraction, the oil looks very dark in color because it carries a lot of the waxes and chlorophylls through. You can use that for your ointments and whatnot. You don’t waste any plant material; you can extract everything. Using ethyl alcohol, you’re reclaiming everything.

So this was a cold extraction, two different methods. Let’s have a look at the color difference.

As you can see the color difference between the bud and the sugarleaf, you can see a little difference there. That’s our second extraction from the bud. There’s very small amounts of oil and resin and this, and this is more concentrated. So these are two styles of extraction, and there are probably many more. We’ll get these ready and start to render. And then finally I’ll show you Rick Simpson oil — we’ll take everything. And then I’ll reclaim it and show you what we reclaim.

–video cuts, setup is now glass jugs with tape marking levels–

As you can see, two different styles here, one being the bud — we may have had a bit of contamination here, it looks like a little bit of chlorophyll got in, we’ll find out. So this is the bud. The reason I put the tape on here so it shows us our recovery. Once we take out most of the ethyl alcohol to leave the resin behind, regardless of what plant material it may be, I’m going to show you how much we actually catch, which is nearly everything. This is the sugarleaf. You can see the difference in color, and again I was much more liberal with the alcohol I used because there’s a lot more of the I triclones that I wanted to remove with the bud, other than the sugarleaf.

Basically what I would do is pour that in like so. Pours into pot of weed witch. You can wait until they get to room temperature because they are quite cold, but that’s totally up to you. I’m going to start heating these guys up and show you guys the assembly of the still.

–part 4–

We’re going to go through the assembly of the still. For those who have already purchased the Alchemist over the years, the reason I’ve taken so long to make this work is so that the still can be used with the Witch Herbal Extractor. For those who are unfamiliar with distilling, it’s quite easy — if you can boil a cup of tea, you can do this. The reason I chose this as a boiling pot is because it’s double-insulated and a great pot; I used one of these every day for a year [to distill water] and it’s still going strong.

Basically, the Alchemist comes packed like this, pre-assembled. Everything comes with it, things like this infrared temperature reader. This power reducer lowers the power of the heating element, so that you don’t get rid of all your terpenes and flavors you want to keep intact.

So this is the main body of the still, with the thermometer here. Basically what’s happening is when the ethyl alcohol comes through the unit through here, you’ve got a thermometer that’s reading what’s happening in here — there’s dividing tray here —  and it’s reading the temperature of the ethyl alcohol. This is very important; we’ll go through this later.

Then we have the final condenser which condenses the alcohol or the solvent leaving the tower. There’s cold water running through the unit, through the coil, and leaving as warm water. Basically, this unit is cooling down the vapor. When the ethyl alcohol is leaving the pot, the proof is up around about 95% alcohol and leaving at about 71/72 degrees fahrenheit. When it’s leaving [the boiler], it comes up here and hits the coil, it’s recondensing the vapor into a liquid and then coming out this way [through the condenser]. The reason I’ve got a liquid management tap here I’ll explain to you later on. When you’re making your alcohol — with a TTB.gov permit if you wish to do that — this liquid management tap allows reflux, bringing up the purity and the strength of the ethyl alcohol from your wash or fermentation. So that’s it, that’s the still.

This is the sugarleaf in here [in weed witch pot]. We’re going to be pouring into this one [glass jug] back up to this level [marked by tape] so that when we get close to it, I can turn it down. First things first, put our gasket on here. Puts on still, clamps it on. Again, do this with two people. The great thing about this unit is that it’s all encased, no vapor exposed regardless of the solvent you use. I’ve heard of people using butane and had problems with explosions trying to vapor off. This is all encased, stripping all those solvents off, purging it, and will leave you your resin in your container. Then just [pull down your new tray?] and then purge it off with a very low temperature for a few days.

Temperature gauge on the still reads this, and we’ve got another temperature gauge that reads inside the pot. You can set its timer so that you know how long you’ve been doing your extraction. I usually my temperature with a beeper so that I know when it reaches a certain point or changes a degree fahrenheit, so it lets me know to check and see what’s going on. It’s so simple to check. Do this with gloves because it’s going to be quite warm and have someone hold the base. Wait until it settles down for five minutes and then lift it open — you don’t want that vapor coming up and going through your nose.

The power reducer is going to regulate the wattage going in. This is around about 630 watts. You can bring this down to pretty much nothing, so you can really manipulate temperatures.  This is very important with some of the finer terpenes in any plant material: your pines, your lemons, your limes. All those you want to try to keep intact. That’s of course with the cannabis, but also with all the other herbs and spices out there.

So we’ll get this fired up. Just plug one end into the wall (it’s a 15 amp) and the other end plugged into the back of the unit. The most important thing before you hook this up: test your water, that you do have water running. So water going out, very limited amount of water: you can do that by testing how warm the water is [?]. Cold water going in here. [Note from video: “hook these up to water hoses, and keep cool water running through the blue hose to cool it down. It will leave the red hose to a sink where you will discard the spent water”]

So that’s it. Very simple to set up. The next stage is to fire this up and start producing a product.

-pt 5-

Hey guys, just an update. Two units running. Checking thermometers on stills: We’ve got 170.2 on this one, 170 on this one. They’re running pretty good. Liquid management taps are fully open. The alcohol inside the unit — they’re both at 173. The amount of product coming out, as you can see here (looking at levels on glass jugs)we’ve probably got half an inch to go. These have been running for about 55 minutes. It took about 17 minutes to heat up, and this one took 11 minutes to heat up — we started out with different amounts of alcohol, which is why one took longer to heat up.

A good thing is to always check the strength of the alcohol coming out. It’s quite simple. Take your alcohol meter, put it into your vessel, fill up the amount of alcohol you need, and this would determine the strength of the alcohol coming out. Our reading on this is 92% alcohol. I would run this through the still with your copper mesh in the glass vessel, which I’ll show you later on.

–cut / time elapses–

As you can see, number one here is completed. Just turn it off. We’re reading 174 up here. It read about 92% alcohol so there’s a little bit of water in it, so that’s what we’re [heating out?]. [The unit’s thermometer] is reading 176.

So turn it off. Again, you don’t want to open it just yet — give it around about 5 minutes for all of the vapor to be knocked down. Just unplug it. You can turn off the water.

–cut / time elapses —

I’ll show you the amount of alcohol we’ve reclaimed. Everything’s off and has been sitting for while, so there’s no need for gloves now. Just going to pop to top off. You can see some of the vapors coming out here. You can really smell those terpenes.

Remember how much was there? This was the sugarleaf. I’m going to be pouring it into here [tray]. There’s not that much alcohol in there, so I’m going to use this alcohol that we’ve just reclaimed. I’m just going to show you how much we’ve actually got. Pointing to tape mark on glass container: this is how much we’ve started with, so that shows you how much we lost. As you can see in here, it’s basically the water. I’m just going to put a bit of this alcohol in here [the unit pot] so I can move some of this oil around, and then we’ll pour it out. Pours into tray. And there we have it. It has a nice gold tinge to it, which is great.

–pt 6–

OK, this is the second batch, which is the bud. Pours into tray. There’s a lot more in this one. What I like to do is put a bit of the reclaimed alcohol in here, swill whatever’s left in there, and there it goes.

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This is the second style. This is going to be a distillation of plant matter. Again, you can do this with just about anything. So we’ve probably got a pint and a half of ethyl alcohol in there — you should put a little more, but anyway. So the two different materials we ran before through the cold infusion. We’re going to do a reflux. I’ve turned the liquid management tap completely off, so instead of coming out, it’s going to fill the dividing tray and run back down. So it’s going to be recycling. You can do this for as long as you want; 20 or 30 minutes, some people run it for an hour or more. We’ll see the color change. So that’s going to keep bringing the ethyl alcohol up as a vapor, recondensing the vapor to a liquid, and the liquid runs back down.

–pt 7–

As you can see, the ethyl alcohol is running through the towers. I’m going to dismantle it and show you what’s actually happening here. We’ve turned off the liquid management tap, so it’s just recycling here.

So this is the Rick Simpson oil. The ethyl alcohol is going through all of the plant matter. This will be your final run, and you can run this for as long as you want. You can do this without doing the freezing; both ways work. Again, with this way, you’re definitely getting a lot more chlorophyll.

Another thing: don’t pack these too tightly. You want to have the solvent running through the material pretty freely, so there’s no pressure build-up.

–pt 8–

Cleanup. Quite simple. Every time you run the still, clean it up. If you’re be running it back-to-back you wouldn’t need to, but if there’ll be some time between runs it’s good to have a clean still.

The top section here: if you want to bring [the copper] back to its original shiny, clean state, you can sit this in citric acid for 15-20 minutes and then neutralize it with baking soda. That will bring it back to a nice state and give it a good clean.

We’re going to take screen mesh off. You must remember, too, that down below you have another screen mesh, and you want to hold on to that while we’re taking this off. You don’t want this stuff going everywhere. And again, if you haven’t let this sit long enough, use some gloves.

Takes off bottom screen and shakes it into container.

Sometimes you may have to work the plant material out because of how packed in there it is, so I’m going to start with the other side. This is all through trial-and-error as well, there are probably many ways you could do this. Then basically, clean [the glass] with a little bit of ethyl alcohol and hot water. Don’t use any chemicals. Once you get the last bit of ethyl alcohol out of this, you can put it in a cheesecloth and squeeze it and that will get the remaining solvent out of this. I suppose you’d want to do a total reclaim out of this and get everything back you can. You can put this in fine mesh, it’s really up to.

I think I’ve covered just about everything. A clean still is a good still. Make sure you turn all of the power off and water off.

Another thing: one unit is all you need, as long as you keep your material frozen and your solvent frozen. Just keep emptying it, refilling it, doing the process over and over. One’s fine.