Tek Easy to read Skunk Pharm QWET Instructions

[AmberAlchemist]

@2clicker - I am fascinated with the dry ice approach though. I've got this on my amazon wish list: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009AQURTE/ ( and this to go along with it: http://www.harborfreight.com/1-1-4-quarter-cubic-ft-compact-cement-mixer-91907.html ). I'll bet it would be stupid simple to fabricate something similar to the $600 cone to snap on to the $150 mixer.

 

[AmberAlchemist]

BTW - I should note: my yields, with 2 washes @ 3 min each, no decarb, whole flowers, would yield .5g shatter from 3.5g prime nug run pretty consistently. Usually split about .3/.2 between first wash and second, with the second wash always being "cloudier" than the first.

I recently got an aero press coffee press, so I'm going to see if that can help to clear the material of solvent after the first wash to try and minimize the extra plant material coming out in the second wash. My thought is to just use the air trapped in the chamber to help dry the material, not necessarily "press" it.

 

[StickyShisha2]

I'm interested to hear how this turns out. I also happen to live in a wonderful, sunny, mountainous state where I can drive down the street and buy kief at $15/g from my friendly neighborhood dispensary - so if the kief route pans out, I may start just stocking up on bags and bags of kief.

So for kief, you can obviously use less solvent to start. Are you even doing an initial strain with kief? Almost seems trivial - seems like you could almost just dissolve the frozen kief in frozen alcohol, let it sit overnight to winterize, filter, and evap.

The other thing that's driving me crazy that I'm tinkering with is "drying apparatus". I know there's the "throw down a sticky pad" option, but I don't like the idea of worn silicone sloughing off / leeching into the product, at any PPM. The scraping route is tedious, and i know i'm losing a lot on the edges. I bought a ceramic sushi plate that was long and flat in hopes it would help keep the liquid away from the edges and easy to scrape, but the dish wasn't perfectly flat and the liquid pooled at the edges. I just found a 5"X5" square ceramic plate on a science supply site, so I may order one and give it a try. I'm also considering trying a solution where I dry the product on [any plate, dish, pyrex, etc..] but on top of unbleached hemp paper - instead of trying to fight the chemistry of "what's going to leech into it", I almost wonder if giving in and saying "ok what's the least harmful thing that i don't mind leeching in?" and hemp paper was the natural first thought. Is there such thing as "hemp parchment paper"?

Does anyone have any other solutions / tricks / ideas for easily getting the product out after evaporation?

winterizing kief is easy (if you have a good filtering tech):
add kief to small amount of EC in closeable glass container
let fully dissolve (may need to be above room temp for a bit)
put closed container into freezer for at least half a day
have some more virgin EC cold in freezer
pour keif/EC mix through filter into evap dish
add a bit of clean cold EC to the now empty container and swish it around
pour that through the filter after the first stuff if done filtering to wash the last bit of goodies off the waxes and down into your evap dish.

I recently got an aero press coffee press, so I'm going to see if that can help to clear the material of solvent after the first wash to try and minimize the extra plant material coming out in the second wash. My thought is to just use the air trapped in the chamber to help dry the material, not necessarily "press" it.

aeropress works great for this. and even better once i got 10, 25, and 50 micron SS screens

 

[AmberAlchemist]

aeropress works great for this. and even better once i got 10, 25, and 50 micron SS screens

I was about to ask where you got these wondrous screens, and then realized it was a link, thanks! Wish I could get them from Amazon and have them delivered tomorrow. I bought the s-filter, but my math is saying it's somewhere near 113microns, so not nearly small enough to filter out the undesirables.

 

[2clicker]

I'm interested to hear how this turns out. I also happen to live in a wonderful, sunny, mountainous state where I can drive down the street and buy kief at $15/g from my friendly neighborhood dispensary - so if the kief route pans out, I may start just stocking up on bags and bags of kief.

So for kief, you can obviously use less solvent to start. Are you even doing an initial strain with kief? Almost seems trivial - seems like you could almost just dissolve the frozen kief in frozen alcohol, let it sit overnight to winterize, filter, and evap.

The other thing that's driving me crazy that I'm tinkering with is "drying apparatus". I know there's the "throw down a sticky pad" option, but I don't like the idea of worn silicone sloughing off / leeching into the product, at any PPM. The scraping route is tedious, and i know i'm losing a lot on the edges. I bought a ceramic sushi plate that was long and flat in hopes it would help keep the liquid away from the edges and easy to scrape, but the dish wasn't perfectly flat and the liquid pooled at the edges. I just found a 5"X5" square ceramic plate on a science supply site, so I may order one and give it a try. I'm also considering trying a solution where I dry the product on [any plate, dish, pyrex, etc..] but on top of unbleached hemp paper - instead of trying to fight the chemistry of "what's going to leech into it", I almost wonder if giving in and saying "ok what's the least harmful thing that i don't mind leeching in?" and hemp paper was the natural first thought. Is there such thing as "hemp parchment paper"?

Does anyone have any other solutions / tricks / ideas for easily getting the product out after evaporation?

yes i would def filter the kief run. unless you are really refining your kief. the kief stalks will not dissolve and can be removed. if you can filter your kief down to trich heads only then i would say not filtering would work, but i do t plan on spending that much time refining the kief. ive been using 50, 25, and 10 micron SS mesh for filtering and it is great.

regarding collection... look into Oil Slick prods "slick sheet". it is 100% ptfe sheeting and is totally safe to evap ethanol from. i line a pyrex dish with slick sheet and evap out of that. i figure when evaping just enough EC for a kief run, that collection will be a breeze due to the fact that it will be a small puddle of ehtanol instead of the whole dish full.

 

[hishighness]

Haven't had time to read all the posts but since we're on the discussion of kief ethanol runs (I plan on doing one as well soon as I find some time in the next week or two) so not sure if I'm even contributing to conversation here but wanted to get these tidbits in that Skunk Pharm posted on their QWET page comments:

RE: amount of ethanol to use for kief vs. plant

Kif does have a higher resin content, so it would take more alcohol to dissolve it, than it would for the same volume of plant material. I would suggest starting at 5X and experimenting from there.

So 1 gram of kief needs 5x more ethanol than would 1 gram of bud.

RE: soaking/winterizing/freezing:

No need to winterize with Kif and ethanol. You can soak and shake until it is dissolved, because you aren’t worried about chlorophyll pickup. Probably in the neighborhood of ten to thirty minutes to get it all.

You don’t need to freeze kif in the first place, as the water solubles and chlorophyll have already been mostly removed from the picture.

You can boil the kif for maximum extraction speed, but that will also partially decarboxylate it and it most likely won’t end up shatter.

If you want to end up with light colored carboxylic acid shatter, I would keep the alcohol below ~80F during extraction and cold boil away the alcohol under vacuum to purge.

 

[2clicker]

Haven't had time to read all the posts but since we're on the discussion of kief ethanol runs (I plan on doing one as well soon as I find some time in the next week or two) so not sure if I'm even contributing to conversation here but wanted to get these tidbits in that Skunk Pharm posted on their QWET page comments:

RE: amount of ethanol to use for kief vs. plant

So 1 gram of kief needs 5x more ethanol than would 1 gram of bud.

RE: soaking/winterizing/freezing:

that is only if you are comparing the same weight in both kief and flowers. in my case i would normally run a 1/2oz of flowers. so instead i will be running however much kief i get from a 1/2oz of flowers. i wont be running a 1/2oz of kief (although i wish i could!).

so im guessing that the amount of ethanol needed to submerge the kief will be much less than it takes to submerge the flowers.

 

[StickyShisha2]

i like to get as much goodness into the alcohol as possible, to make for less purging.

 

[AmberAlchemist]

No need to winterize with Kif and ethanol. You can soak and shake until it is dissolved, because you aren’t worried about chlorophyll pickup. Probably in the neighborhood of ten to thirty minutes to get it all.

You don’t need to freeze kif in the first place, as the water solubles and chlorophyll have already been mostly removed from the picture.

You can boil the kif for maximum extraction speed, but that will also partially decarboxylate it and it most likely won’t end up shatter.

If you want to end up with light colored carboxylic acid shatter, I would keep the alcohol below ~80F during extraction and cold boil away the alcohol under vacuum to purge.

Seriously? So - pretty much just gobs of easy awesomeness? Am I reading this correctly that they're essentially saying "take room temperature everclear, insert room temperature kief, shake vigorously for [up to] 30 minutes to fully dissolve everything, and then simply evap (best done "cold" (room temp) under vacuum pressure)?"

 

[MikeInMiami]

Seriously? So - pretty much just gobs of easy awesomeness? Am I reading this correctly that they're essentially saying "take room temperature everclear, insert room temperature kief, shake vigorously for [up to] 30 minutes to fully dissolve everything, and then simply evap (best done "cold" (room temp) under vacuum pressure)?"

I'd also like to know if this is correct, seems to be quite an easy process and a good way for me to use my excess keef

 

[farscaper]

I'd also like to know if this is correct, seems to be quite an easy process and a good way for me to use my excess keef

you will want to filter it after winterizing to get the "gobs of golden goodness" if you dont all the wax will be in the alcohol and could cause trouble during purge.

 

[walrus]

you will want to filter it after winterizing to get the "gobs of golden goodness" if you dont all the wax will be in the alcohol and could cause trouble during purge.

You don't really pull much wax from kief so winterizing isn't really a necessary step. I would however filter out the spent kief from the ethanol before evaporation to get a pristine oil.

 

[AmberAlchemist]

I used 5g of kief (and 1g of "full melt bubble hash" of the same strain, that was definitely NOT full melt). A few observations:

- While trying to dissolve everything, something just didn't want to dissolve. I kept adding everclear thinking I needed more solvent, and warmed the solution as well. I let it sit for a few hours too just to be sure it had enough time to dissolve, but it never did. It was a reddish color, so it's probably wax, just interesting that it came out of solution so easily.

- Because of the first observation, I ended up using WAY more alcohol than necessary, ended up filling the mason jar with 4 cups of alcohol, which in hindsight seems way excessive obviously, but now that I'm capturing the evap, I'm no as worried.

- Because of how dark the bubble hash was, I went ahead and winterized. There has been quite a bit that appears to have fallen out of solution.

- I'm still waiting for some better supplies to arrive (like my new vac chamber), but I wanted to run some of it to see what the yield was. So - 1 cup of the alcohol / kief / bubble hash solution yielded about .7-.8g of oil, pretty sappy still though, and kinda green, even after running it through a 55 and 25 micron filter. I might redissolve and run it through the 10 micron filter once it arrives and see if it comes out any cleaner.

Overall - I'm still undecided about this route. I love the yields, but not loving the flavor / appearance so far. Might be interesting to try the frozen route with the kief, as well as leave out the bubble hash - I got impatient and dropped it all in because i'd been wasting so much alcohol trying to get it fully dissolved, plus was pissed when I tried to dab the "full melt" while I was working and had a chunk of ash left on my dabber - YEEEUCK.

 

[AmberAlchemist]

P.S. I should also report that the kief was pretty green, so obviously they spent a little longer shaking than they should have and there was definitely way more plant material than I would have liked (as evidenced by their full melt, which was probably made from the kief). I'm going to have to shop around a bit and see if I can find somewhere with cleaner kief to start from, or just find a good deal on some material and kief it myself.

 

[hishighness]

Finally about to start this! Straight up can't tell you guys how excited I am right now haha, like way more excited than a person should be - about 50% of my time in the next couple months is going to be spent on perfecting this technique (still need to order a vacuum oven).

Got my 190 proof everclear last week and and about to run and get some dry ice/other instruments I need but my plan right now is:

Dekief all my material
Have ethanol sitting in the freezer
Mix kief/ethanol up a shit ton
Put in freezer few minutes
Mix it up again
Put it back in the freezer for few minutes
Strain through coffee filter
Put it on a large surface area pyrex tray
Let it sit outside with fan on top (used IR thermometer and groud temp outside in the shade is about ~90*F so perfect, I'll be watching it though)
Scrape and enjoy

Any last minute recommendations for me?

Edit: Oh yeah, and my buddies and I tried drinking the everclear and the cool thing about it was when you spill it on the outside of your mouth you can literally feel it disappearing/evaporating off. And then it burns pretty bad and you regret drinking 95% grain alcohol but still, never knew what evaporation felt like

 

[hishighness]

Took me several weeks but finally have a decent output!

Managed to get all the proper equipment (vacuum oven/slick sheets/buchner funnel) so I could actually run a decent amount of material easily (compared to what I was doing before this is actually pretty easy now) - I'm still waiting on my vacuum pump to arrive but should be here this week. You can see there's lots of bubbles in there, I've been purging at ~100*F and I think they won't pop at that temp until I get a vacuum (Skunk Pharm reported their bubbles refusing to pop until 115*). I would flip if I could but got no idea how to do that.

Right now the oil is actually pretty solid (can touch it no problem) but very flaky and comes off in bits in pieces (rather than like a slab), honestly my biggest problem so far is definitely just transferring the damn stuff! I thought the point of slick sheet was not having the scrape but just pressing and wiping worked like shit for me. I'm going to try it on a heat pad next time like this guy:

Any advice would be greatly appreciated! I hit this stuff out the healthstone and idk if it was placebo or what but it didn't feel like a dab normally does (where I get very clear and alert high), it felt like I just took a fat snap of kief and I got real real stoned, like it was legitimately tough to think clearly and knocked me the fuck out. Definitely not complaining though!

 

[2clicker]

i wouldnt be concerned with vac purging qwet. evapping in a warm dish and time is more than enough to get the ethanol out. residual ethanol left behind (little to none) will not hurt you or your concentrate.

also, if you are using small amounts of EC then i dont believe that evapping outside is necessary.

regarding retrieval from the OSPad... try the fold and peel method...? something that might help... warm the OSP/oil and then let it cool off. then try to peel it off. i would also suggest trying the oil slick sheet over the pads. fold and peel works great with the sheet IME.

 

[Enchantre]

I've just put 4g of flower in a mason jar in the freezer. The everclear is already in there.

I'm ready to give this a shot! I've had great success in reclaim ISO extraction, and I can only imagine that this will turn out even better.

I will report back on results. Perhaps with photos. Maybe.

 

[Enchantre]

Okay, my third wash is now being fanned dry.

First wash, I got 0.12g of a very stiff, honey colored oil It started out looking like wax, but, in an effort to get the water to evap off, we did the "warm" thing (and it was just barely warm), and that worked!, and it turned it to oil.

Second wash, I got 0.3g of lovely amber oil. a little to loose for the vape pen, but a tiny dab in the VXN and I am really feeling it!

There are photos, btw, on my Instagram ("OMG, Enchantre's on Instagram? Why didn't I know this?"). When my kitchen's clean (someday) and I have better lighting, I could see doing a vid on this.

Next, I went to the co-op and got a 1/4 of chamomile blossoms, and used my french press. Did just one wash, and it's also being fanned now. A quarter of chamomile, btw, cost me $0.82.

This tek is great! I actually feel like I know what I'm doing!

EDIT: So, the medication effects are great! I've been doing all kinds of housework with minimal PAIN! and no couch-lock.

Downside: Leaves carbon/sugar residue in the VXN. My nails are soaking in PBW right now.
I think I'll store this for 90 days, and see how well the naturally decarbolizing works - or, I'll make brownies.

I will report on the chamomile yield, once that's all evap'd.

 

[Enchantre]

Third wash of QWET yielded 0.18g, for a total yield of 0.6g from 4g of flowers.

and that third wash? OMFG... a hit of that put my hubby into lala land for 2 hours. with residual effects for a couple of more. I had a lovely afternoon, just puttering about, oblivious to pain or anxiety.

I might sneak some, time to time, for vaping purposes. Really excited to see how it turns out later.

Oh, and my leftover flowers I've plunked into a dark jar, and covered with everclear. I'm thinking tincture...

 

[severalmore]

nice work @AmberAlchemist! i never decarb flowers before running them. isnt that only needed for edibles? if you are vaping the oil then it does not need to be decarb'd... no?

i know that heating flowers before a run can help remove odor from the oil, of which is useful for oil being turned into eliquid for stealth purposes.

as for everclear and its costs... have you considered doing a dry ice run and then a qwet wash? this will allow you to use much less EC for the wash. and should produce a cleaner prod that wouldnt likely need to be filtered as much.

keep it up!

You mention smoking out of a vaporizer. I know this is slightly off topic but I'm new to this posting/forum thing and so I apologize in advance if this is the wrong place to ask this.
I smoke concentrates, mainly wax and shatter, using a portable pen battery and seego metal cup atomizer with dual coil. Works great, discreet etc. My goal is to vape oil with a similar setup, but I've been looking and experimenting with different tanks and methods, so I can fill a wick and coil tank with oil and Vale all day. The problem I encounter is that oil from the dispensatyvis too thick, it doesn't wick properly, tanks leak etc...o pen sells a refill kit, where the oil is premixed with some thinning agent, and The Lab makes a tank refill kit, their oil is mixed with ethylene oxide polymer, ethanol, and vegetable glycerin.
My plan is to make some hash/oil using the qwet method. However it seems like the end result is very thick, like shatter--wont complain about that, but what I need is something thinner that I can fill a vape tank with...maybe a genesis style tank, liquid on bottom, wicks up to coil...
Do you have any thoughts on this? Anyone out there putting oil into vape tanks with success? I've heard 70-30, pg/vg mic is good but?

 

[2clicker]

You mention smoking out of a vaporizer. I know this is slightly off topic but I'm new to this posting/forum thing and so I apologize in advance if this is the wrong place to ask this.
I smoke concentrates, mainly wax and shatter, using a portable pen battery and seego metal cup atomizer with dual coil. Works great, discreet etc. My goal is to vape oil with a similar setup, but I've been looking and experimenting with different tanks and methods, so I can fill a wick and coil tank with oil and Vale all day. The problem I encounter is that oil from the dispensatyvis too thick, it doesn't wick properly, tanks leak etc...o pen sells a refill kit, where the oil is premixed with some thinning agent, and The Lab makes a tank refill kit, their oil is mixed with ethylene oxide polymer, ethanol, and vegetable glycerin.
My plan is to make some hash/oil using the qwet method. However it seems like the end result is very thick, like shatter--wont complain about that, but what I need is something thinner that I can fill a vape tank with...maybe a genesis style tank, liquid on bottom, wicks up to coil...
Do you have any thoughts on this? Anyone out there putting oil into vape tanks with success? I've heard 70-30, pg/vg mic is good but?

whoa whoa whoa... easy with that word "smoke" there. we dont take kindly to combustion around here. lol

i shot you a reply to your PM. welcome aboard!

 

[severalmore]

Yikes! Sorry about the smoke word! I wasn't thinking...

 

[2clicker]

@2clicker you are absolutely right - I do forget how expensive it can be, and lack of access.

As far as the expense, I had thought about it as well when I was first heeing and hawing over what to use.

I guess I considered that 750ml of Everclear 191 is about 30 bucks. I use about 250ml per 2 zips, so the 750ml bottle allows me to process 6 (I can actually do 8 no problem if doing a large batch) zips total. So I use an ongoing $30 in extra "equipment and supplies" (if that makes sense?) to create 16-20gr finished oil. (The only other equipment is a fondue pot, which does run around $50, but allows me to do both a boiling water bath OR a hotter oil bath in one unit, so I like it, and was obviously a one-time investment in my consideration at the time).

So I guess you would have to compare that to whatever equipment and supplies are for another method. I don't know what hexane-ish stuff costs, or an ISO setup.

Some folks have been looking at that "KleenExtract" (don't know the price, or its safety - honestly, with so many people using that now, you may want to address it specifically in this safety section as well @herbivore21 ? But so NOT trying to be Mr. Bossy. :-)), as well as high-proof Polish vodka. NOT promoting the safety here, just addressing some possible alternatives that people MIGHT be able to use if it was determined that there was some safety *benefit* to using it at *some* point during the creation of concentrates, and then we all might want to think about covering those safety pros/cons as well.

But of course, you were SO right (and I had a "D'oh" moment as soon as I read your post 2clicker!) that there are many people that don't have access to high-proof alcohol *at all*.

Now that being said - if were are considering that any ethanol-extraction might need (if we were shooting for absolute purity, not saying people *should* or *should not* shoot for it - I absolutely believe each person has to decide for themselves, that being said, of course this thread was created for those who are at least considering the further purification of their end product) to have impurity/safety concerns addressed at some point later in the process (like during a good purge) anyway, then I think that there is usually Everclear 151 available in most States/Commonwealths, and has been used to great success. (I think @Enchantre mentioned using it.)

As always 2clicker, thanks for helping me out. Need to keep my mind open, open, OPEN!

:-)

Lots of peace to you!

$30 for 750ml? yikes. i get that for $15, but i live very close to where EC is produced so maybe thats why its cheap here...?

and can you explain how you do your washes? i ask because you mention only using 250ml to wash 2 zips? i find myself using that much for 1 zip. so how are you washing? are you using a jar? do you pack the flowers down into the jar to shorten the height of the flowers in the jar... so it takes less EC to cover them? please advise.

ISO is much cheaper than ethanol. the setup is the same as QWET except the wash times are much shorter. ISO is considerably more aggressive so you are looking at a 20-30 sec wash instead of 3 mins.

KleenXtract is almost exactly the same as EC. in fact i think its slightly even a higher proof than EC. so basically its high grade ethanol. so really when someone does a QWET run they could be using either EC or KX. i would try KX, but i do not see the need as i have EC available at every corner market on the block. i stopped using ISO when i tasted my first batch of QWET.

a vac purge setup is on my radar next.

 

[killick]

@2clicker would you need to vacuum purge with ET/KX? I thought that was mainly for BHO?

So we moved one province further west last year. I *could* buy EC off the shelf before. Here I need a permit. So I phoned to find out about the permit and discovered that if I have a prescription I can buy it at the local pharmacy, and my med plan will likely pay for it... Now I need to find a doctor, as ours is still back in the last residence... Thanks Gubmint for making the process easy to follow for us mere people that pay your salaries...