Hello everyone, Nick with Precision here. And today, we're going to talk about a very
important topic in extraction and that's material preparation. How do you prepare
your biomass in order to optimize your extraction and there's an overarching theme,
overarching principle that we want to keep in mind while we're going through these points. And that
is we're trying to preserve the native essence of the plant. So if you can imagine when that plant
is on the stem, when it's growing right, it's producing terpenoids, it's producing cannabinoids.
And those turbines and cannabinoids are really what you want to preserve, and ultimately when we
extract those we want to not adulterate, not harm, not degrade those compounds in any way. And that
starts with actually harvesting your material and preparing your material for extraction.
One of the things that I'll tell you is that different end products require different methods
of material preparation. So for example, live resin, shatter, budder - these all have different
sorts of preparation stages when it comes to even growing. And we can take this one step further
now, we're seeing a lot of different genetics that are specifically tailored just for extraction. We
see this specifically even more frequently in things like water hash and things like
sort of bubble hashes and artisanal products like rosin but also in hydrocarbon extracts in
particular genetics being tailored for extraction. So this is something that's an overarching theme
,so it's starting actually all the way back with the genetic. Once we have the right genetics in
place, it's how do we again preserve that natural essence of the plant? How do we
preserve those high terpene profiles? How do we preserve those cannabinoids? And one of the
ways that we can do that is we can freeze it, and when we freeze our biomass we can typically
do a standard freeze and that would be anywhere between you know 10 degrees to -10 degrees.
But we're actually clipping it right off the plant, and we're putting it into the freezer. Now
a lot of people put it in vacuum bags, some people will actually put it in breathable bags so
that you get some of that sublimination of the moisture, but what that's ultimately going to
do you can think about something like harvesting fresh bananas and putting the fresh bananas in
the freezer to preserve them - it's going to slow down that oxidative degradation process.
Not only that it's going to eliminate the chance for those light volatile terpenes to evaporate
or degrade at room temperature, which they will because some of them are very light volatile,
this can even be paired with certain harvesting techniques. Some of those harvesting techniques
could be like taking down early when you have peak terpene content or peak cannabinoid content.
A lot of times in extraction you're not waiting for that ultra robust bud structure you know
when you're smoking flour or selling your biomass to go to flower on the shelf of the dispensary.
You're waiting for those those flowers to really get that dense bud structure. Not always the case
for peak THC production, you actually start to see those trichomes turn amber and start to go
through that oxidative process towards the later part of flower. And ultimately in some cases you
may want to harvest before that happens because that's when you have peak cannabinoid and peak
terpenoid content. So again freezing - one of the number one ways that people preserve
their terpenoids and their cannabinoids, and ultimately that's used for live resin that's
used for a lot of sauces that's used for any sort of high terpene extraction. That's used typically
a lot in propane extraction, and we call this live resin or fresh frozen, there's a million different
terms out there. But these are all applicable to what we're doing with creating these types
of "live" or high terpene content products. And it's because they preserve the terpenes. So
the second part of this really is traditional drying. So when we talk about traditional drying
we're talking about letting the plants go to maturity. This may be field drying,
it may be barn drying, it may be literally just drying rooms where you're hanging at somewhere
around 65 degrees with 50 to 60 percent humidity for six, seven days. You're getting that to a
finished, dried bud, and then you may have a curing process after that. But we typically
see a lot of these techniques used in biomass that is not pre-planned to go to extraction,
but also in biomass that is going to be used for things like shatter.
And the stability of the shatter is really tied to the moisture content, it's tied to
actually the lack of terpenes of the lower terpene content, because it turns it into a solid matrix.
You really evaporate and extract a lot of those terpenes, a lot of those terpenes get degraded,
and that leaves you with more cannabinoids. And ultimately those terpenes will create a
more solubilized product. Meaning it's going to make it more gooey, more liquidy because those
almost act like a solvent with the cannabinoids. But when we remove a lot of those terpenes,
and a lot of them again get removed in a drying process, a lot of them will get removed in a
vacuum oven process to make shatter that's how you're making more solid slabs of shatter. Now
a lot of this biomass can also be bought dried on the third-party market - meaning if you're buying
from a farm or somewhere else that you don't really understand where the biomass is coming from
or how it's been prepared you just know that it's sitting there dried. Well this is a great instance
where we can take that biomass a lot of times we can turn it to shatter with a low temperature
extraction to avoid the waxes. We can also take that dried biomass and move it into something like
distillate and then reconstitute it with terpenes. But both of these methodologies have their place.
A third methodology that's coming at us very quickly and it's there's a resurgence in it and
you're seeing new technologies emerging in this space is freeze drying or deep
freezing or flash freezing - however you want to refer to that. But ultimately what that is,
is you're taking and harvesting the live resin material, or the live resin-like material, which
would be the live plant, the live actual terpenes and cannabinoids as the plants still growing.
You're taking that fresh bud and you're putting it into some sort of deep freezer or freeze
dryer or liquid nitrogen bath. And ultimately what that does it's going to subliminate that
moisture out of there. Right away that deep freeze is just going to absolutely vaporize and
subliminate the moisture. And what happens when you do that is you actually have a preservation
of the cannabinoids, the preservation of a lot of the terpenes. Although some of them do volatilize,
there's certain techniques to do this. But you're going to have a flash frozen-type of
biomass. Ultimately, that biomass can then be used in extraction. We see this with our
CryoCann system where we're flash freezing this biomass and you have a very excellent
profile of preserved cannabinoids and terpenes. That can then be used in a variety of different
methodologies of extraction. The reason that people really like the flash freeze,
or the the deep freeze, is that it allows them to very quickly harvest their material. When
you can very quickly harvest and you don't have to go through that whole drying phase,
and you can go right through extraction. You can imagine the efficiencies that that creates. So in
many cases something like the CryoCann, you know you can harvest 600,000 grams and have that done
very, very quickly - within hours. And ultimately that creates a higher production and you can move
into extraction very, very fast. So it's a very lucrative, very productive area of the business
to operate in. So understanding how to prepare this biomass and how to get all these different
techniques weaved into your production is very important, right? Because you're never going to
work with just one of these techniques if you're an extraction lab, or you have a production lab.
It's more likely that you're going to work with multiple of these different techniques, and you're
going to integrate these into your product plan. So if you watch some of my other videos
I always say it's very important to understand your product plan, understand your production
needs, understand how these products that you're going to create are going to not only tie in with
your front end supply chain of where you're buying biomass from but also go into the retail space.
And see and understand where these products going to be sold, what does the competitive matrix look
like, and how does that all tie together for your overall fundamental business strategy?
So now that we've talked about how we're going to harvest all this material,
let's talk about the step between harvesting and storing and getting it into your extractor and
that's of course "milling." And getting consistent sort of texture and uniform sizing to your biomass
in order for it to go into your extractor. Now there's a wide range of different milling devices
techniques. There's hammer mills, there's shredders, there's all sorts of different
things that you can use, and depending on your extraction technique is going to dictate
exactly how you're going to prepare that biomass - and there's no one scenario fits all.
In most instances, we're going to mill to somewhere around a quarter inch size
if we're using a centrifuge or something like that. That allows the channeling of the ethanol
to go out from the sides of the centrifuge. If we're doing something like a hydrocarbon,
we may not mill at all it may just be complete nugs going in there - "nug run" they call it.
And we get very good saturation through the biomass and hydrocarbon, because we can use
that pressure to penetrate into that into that biomass and dissolve those cannabinoids and those
terpenes. Now other techniques on large scale commonly use mills that are taking it to a very
fine consistency. Now we see this like in the hemp market people that are using large scale
continuous centrifuges, decanter centrifuges, things like that where you're actually milling it
down and you're doing a pre-mix. And ultimately what this looks like - it looks like a giant
vessel and you're almost taking it to a sand, or powder-like, consistency. You're agitating
in a mixer and then you're passing that through a filtration device - which could again could be
a decanter centrifuge, could be a filter press, there's a million different devices that you can
use to facilitate that technique. I guess it's really important to understand is the point that
I would make about your extraction methodology, and how you're going to prepare your biomass.
And again, if you have questions about this and you need guidance on how to prepare the biomass,
please call us. Because there's no one scenario fits all. Again, like I said
it's going to be different from cold extraction, to room temp extraction, to ethanol extraction,
centrifugal extraction, hydrocarbon extraction, continuous industrial extraction. All these forms
of biomass preparation are different on the front end with your extraction methodology. And then of
course as we discussed, all the methods of biomass material harvesting and preparation
are different based upon your output product. So again, there is no one scenario fits all,
but you need to call somebody that has substantial experience and give you guidance on how to do this
and we're absolutely here to help you. On that, I know this has been a lot of information to take
in, I hope that this has given you some guidance on how to harvest, prepare, store, and mill
your material in preparation for extraction. And again, as always if you have any questions at all,
we are the experts. Please reach out to us at Precision Extraction
www.precisionextraction.com or you can always give us a call. We're happy to help. Thanks so much.