Filtering Cannabis Tincture Before Evaporation
Did You Know? Filtering Your Tincture in Between Extraction and Evaporation is Critical
Previously, in the Did You Know series we’ve discussed why filtering cannabis tincture prior to re-chilling your ethanol solvent is important to producing a high-quality product. However, here we’ll discuss why it’s also important to filter your tincture prior to evaporation.
How does it work?
Depending on your specific SOP, when it comes to your solvent’s temperature and extraction residency time, different filtration steps may be needed between extraction and evaporation. However, with cold ethanol extraction, if performed correctly (maintaining -40˚C throughout the process), the only filtration step that should be necessary is a filtration to remove particulate.
The removing of particulate is important because while the Plate Heat Exchangers within the Falling Film Evaporator (FFE) are great at transferring thermal energy (primarily because of their large surface area), the downside is that they may clog quite easily. Severe clogging may also happen within the delicate volumetric flowmeter the FFE utilizes. Both being difficult to clean and costly to replace.
And if there is particulate in your tincture during evaporation, this will significantly increase cleaning and maintenance labor on the evaporation column causing expensive downtime. All of which makes any post–processing performed with the ethanol-derived crude extract much more difficult.
Therefore, we recommend filtering your tincture of particulate down to 1u (micron) prior to siphoning it into the FFE system for evaporation. This step in the process is absolutely critical to optimizing your ethanol extraction process.
Learn more about the Falling Film Evaporator (FFE).