Is winterizing absolutely necessary for making e-juice?

Hey guys i just ordered my first sub ohm tank kit and i have two questions regarding the e juice i Want to make:

First, i realize winterizing concentrates makes a smoother juice that doesnt clog up your attys as quick, but is that the only upside or does it make a stronger hitting juice too?...if you start out with quality bho/shatter from a dispensary can this step be skipped?

Also, does anybody have any experience with decarbing before mixing into vg/pg ?
I read somewhere that it makes the mix emulsify better, as well as hit harder...thank you so much for any help!

 

Winterizing make your final product cleaner and more potent but with a huge loss in taste and weight too (it depends...). Most folks around like to keep the proprietary terpènes unique profile of extracted buds, that's what I do except with reclaim and some nasty extraction/rosin.

I decarbed some DME extraction I done some weeks ago and yes it helps to get a more sappy/runny oil but with a loss in taste too. but in both case you can add terpènes back after...

 

Ive been decarbing with the nova from ardent and it actually does a really good job at retaining terpenes so im not worried about the decarb, my only concern there was that if the thc is already converted then the heat from the vape might convert it to cbn?

Also, you consider rosin to be a nasty extraction? If anything i feel like rosin, when pressed around 300 f , makes for one of the cleanest extracts ive tried and i would think it would have the least need for winterizing...

 

Not at all but it happens some strains turn in weird rosin extract.... although most are fines!

 

What terpenes are being preserved during decarboxylation temperatures? If there are still terpenes in the material I would guess there's still THC-A as well.

 

The ardent is a neat little device. Some terps are lost but not many.you can still smell and taste the original profile of your herbs after.

 

Make sure you guys aren't confusing winterizing and decarbing. Winterization is stripping the excess plant lipids out of your wax and essentially re-purging them, resulting in a cleaner, clearer, and smoother extract. You'll notice lower quality concentrates almost have a grainy texture to them before they've been winterized. I mainly consume unwinterized BHO. Decarbing will make it more runny, and can help with making e-juice, but winterized concentrates are what's going to result in your coils not clogging as fast, and generally end up with a higher quality end result.

 

Thanks for clearing that up lol. But yea thats basically what i was getting at.i have a small amount of wax from a dispensary but im not sure if i should winterize or not because it looks pretty clean and since its such a small amount id rather not bother winterizing if it wont make a huge difference sheerly due to the fact that id probably lose a significant amount of that in the coffee filter...what do you guys think?

 

I’ve been looking into this for feckin weeks.

First off, why is decarb being talked of about a product that’s gonna be vaped at way beyond decarb temp? Surely in a decarb sense, vaping is no different to smoking?

Secondly, I flat out refuse to ever consider vaping vg/pg crap so am researching the whole dewaxing practice, yes I believe it’s pretty important. There’s talk about lipid pneumonia and so on vaping waxy/oily stuff, but plenty of people do and I’m not hearing much of people dying from it. How is it any different to vaping weed straight? Surely that’s lipid packed too?

I dunno, just know I don’t wanna be inhaling this glycerol/glycerin crap which must be what half the planet are vaping in their nicotine versions?

 

I honestly havent tried it myself yet because ive all but given up on this idea, but the decarbing will make your oil much runnier which in turn SHOULD hypothetically make it easier to blend.

As for the pg/vg, i can see your not wanting to use the pg since its nasty and tastes synthetic asf, but vegetable glycerin is different imo. As far as i know its nothing but synthetic sugar or something and isnt bad for you at all. However, the glycerin is also useless for dissolving an extract on its own.

My suggestion (and what im probably going to do as well) is to look into either the bubbleman trinity tank xl or the hercules cart from uptech.with the trinity, you can place extracts directly into the tank but you will have to add terpenes to liquify it 1st.

The herc on the other hand can apparently take concentrates including thick rosin with no additives, but there is a steep learning curve....these are your best bets because even if you go for a regular tank and juice setup with winterization you will still need to add vg or pg.

 

Glycol toxicity has been discussed in various threads. VG seems to present the least health risk. For e-juice, it's generally derived from plants (hence, "vegetable glycerin"). Glycerin is a ubiquitous product of carbohydrate metabolism. Every cell in our bodies produces glycerin all of the time. That's a good indication it's relatively safe. However, concens can arise when VG is heated to high temperatures, as it's degradation products can be significantly more toxic. Still, it produces less of these degradation products than PG and far less than PEG.

 

Hmm excellent point! I forgot the fact that heating things up changes everything.

 

There isn't enough long term information to really conclude. Definitely some chemical reactions taking place when extracts are processed but I anticipate it will be decades before proper long term studies are available.

 

There’s plenty of distilled vape juices out there. They say sometimes there’s a slight solidifying problem and the liquid will need warming up in the pen before it works properly, synergyofnature’s pen is meant to have some double heating system.

But I’m confused how they arrive at a liquid when all youtubers doing it at home end up with a shatter. Is it simply the difference between distillation and vac/heat/whatever else purge?
Or is it the fact they co2 or butane extract first before the winterisation, whereas homemaders are using QWISO from bud? Still can’t see why that would make a difference especially as the co2 versions are going into the alcohol as a solid shatter first, not flower. I’m missing something

 

Im not sure what your asking? When you say distilled vape juice i assume your talking about juice made from a distillate. These all still have pg and vg in them still, no?

If your asking how they get a concentrate thats liquid WITHOUT adding anything, well there are a couple ways that can happen.if you attempt to make qwiso and let it soak too long you will have a liquidy goo but it will be all but unvapable.mostly, if proper technique is used, all extraction methods i can think of are going to yield you a stable concentrate such as shatter.

If you've seen folks on youtube purging an extract and coming out with a liquid, it could be that since they are making it for the express purpose of making juice they are purposefully trying to decarb and purfe at the same time since we know that decarbing produces an unstable product.

 

No, most distillates aren’t cut with crap (vg/pg etc) hence they’re $60+ for 0.5ml.

Also I doubt decarbing is making any difference to the consistency of a final product. See my post here

http://fuckcombustion.com/threads/concentrates-for-noobs-q-a.13783/page-90

 

Have you tried it? That's pretty much how it works, IME. With QWET, vacuum purge <90F to produce terpy shatter. Purge and decarb at 250F to produce hashy oil.

Still, don't get a runny liquid, more glue-like. Currently processing reclaim, and it's much thinner. Reclaim is similar to distillate in being re-condensed vapor, just not separated into fractions. Wonder why it's more fluid than fully decarbed oil?

 

Oh you’re talking about heating the final product? By decarb I thought u meant decarb the weed at the very beginning, I wonder which loses the least terps, before or after? And surely if u do that last it’ll just return to shatter again once cooled back down?

 

Unfamiliar with details of CO2 extraction and fractional distillation of cannabinoids, so unsure at what point in the process the material is typically decarbed.

With QWET, there's no reason to decarb flower first. If decarboxylation is desired, it's easier and more efficient to do it once the ethanol is reduced to a manageable volume. Decarbing also completely purges the ethanol in a very short time compared to vacuum purging. You can even follow the decarboxylation visually - tiny soda-pop bubbles of CO2 are produced - and see when it's complete.

And no - once it's decarbed, the oil thickens as it cools, but it will never be anything like stable shatter again. The THCA (tetrahydrocannabinolic acid) has been converted into THC (tetrahydrocannabinol). To get shatter, you'd need to convert it back to THCA.

Reclaim processing will be finished tomorrow. Plan to add a low percentage of cannabis-derived terpenes and try vaping it in a Trinity tank. Hopefully, the unpleasant reclaim flavor will be reduced, and it will be thin enough to wick in the tank.

 

I agree with all of this except I have some old ABV reclaim processed with ISO that is a stable shatter.

 

So what you’re saying is that when evaporating off the aolcohol, instead of keeping the temp low as poss to save on terpenes, evap it at 220f so it decarbs at the same time and then it’ll reduce to an oil and not a shatter ?

 

Basically. Ethanol boils at 173F, so at 220F, you're boiling it off. If you start with a large volume of ethanol, this can produce a significant volume of ethanol vapor quickly. Ethanol vapor is flammable, so you'd need good ventilation, electrical stove or hot plate, no open flame or sparks, etc. It's easier and safer (but slower) to evaporate at lower temperature until the ethanol is reduced to a manageable volume (~10-fold more than the concentrated oil). At that point you can transfer to a smaller vessel and place in a 250F bath for the remainder of the process.

At first, you'll see the ethanol boiling vigorously. As it boils off and you're left with mostly oil, the alcohol bubbles more slowly. When it stops bubbling, stir with a bamboo skewer. (Skunk Pharm recommended this, and it works remarkably well.) You'll see the much smaller CO2 bubbles produced by decarboxylation. When these stop, you're left with completely purged and decarbed oil. It could still be very thick, like glue.

Don't know if 220F is a typo, but you'd need an oil bath to get to 220F anyway, so you may as well go with 250F, at which temperature decarboxylation proceeds rapidly. Alternatively, you could use a boiling water bath (212F). Haven't tried this, but it should just take longer.

 

So you do this process and vape thru cart n pen? What’s the flavour like ? Or are so many terps burnt off that u have to add third party ones?

 

That's the idea. With QWET, all of the terps are in the first run, which can be purged to stable shatter. This only gets about 70% of the oil, though, so do second and third runs. This terp-free, hashy tasting material can be decarbed and used in tanks and e-juice.

A work in progress. For today's experiment, using reclaim in the Trinity tank. Added a cleanup step - hexane/brine wash followed by winterization and 0.2um filtration - before decarbing as above. The result is actually thicker than the starting material, so added 5% cannabis-derived terps.

Not bad at all, especially considering it's just reclaim.

 

Have you ever made any from rosin chips?