Thanks, that’s what I was hoping to hear 
Ha, I thought I doing it the lazy stoner’s way, dang, hope it doesn’t effect my Slacker’s Club standing! Curious, though, how would you make it for a specific spectrum, and how come?
Ahhh, gotcha. The alcohol only burns for a little bit, lol! Mrs Horse puts it in her vodka!
You will run into a lot of isolate out there. Everyone that has said to me “I’ve tried CBD and it doesn’t work for me” tried isolate.
When I got them to try full spectrum CBD they all got positive results.
The entourage effect is real.
I make both THC and CBD tincture, the THC ‘pairs’ very well with dark chocolate. I use a silicone ice cube tray as the mold and I ‘aim’ for 100mg each.
You might want to surprise Mrs H with a batch of those if she likes chocolate.
Cheers
G
Ahhhh, so that’s what isolate is, duh!
I’m with you on the entourage effect… and it makes trimming so easy, lol!
we both like dark chocolate… and I’ve got those sillycone trays I use for gummies. Never could figure out how to dose them accurately, though. How do you do that?
I think I may be getting out of slacking territory, lol!
Greetings @ReikoX & tincture fans of OG,
I have run dozens of QWET extractions, but I just ran into something I’d never seen before. I hope someone can identify and explain.
[Warning Extremely Ugly Tincture Pics Ahead!]
This is a story of a tincture gone bad in two chapters. In the first part some phenomenon caused what I think are THC oil bubbles/blobs to precipitate out of an otherwise garden variety QWET extraction.
The second Chapter in this play was a stupid mistake on my part that is only relevant as a cautionary tale; Don’t Do This! Unfortunately, the stupid part is the most visible and least interesting. You’ll see what I mean.
Consider, a mundane, routine, tincture run with about eight grams each of White Widow, Gorilla Grove and Frankie’s Daughter Hilda. WW & GG bud were properly driend and have both cured several months in jars. Hilda was freshly harvested bud that was decarbed, then went directly into the deep freeze last June. I expected to run decarbed Hilda back then but didn’t, so she sat in the freezer.
All three strains were processed the same during extraction: I gave the buds a very rough grind to open them up, then added enough Ethanol to barely cover them. Two days and multiple five-minute gentle shake sessions later, I filtered them and started reduction under a fan. The blue tape in the pics indicates the alcohol level right after filtering, and before reduction.
The lighting in this pic is bad, but you may detect three very different colors from the three strains. Reduction is in progress. Gorilla Grove is the color of good bourbon, White Widow is golden, and Hilda is a pretty spearmint green. They were all almost crystal clear with a little blobby sediment at the bottom with Hilda.
The reduction step, evaporating off some of the alcohol allows me to control the final potency of each batch of tincture. I generally reduce every extraction down to about half the starting filtered volume since that gets me into the target zone, about 30 mg/milliliter.
Subjectively, that potency is enough so I can “feel” the effects of a single dropper (about half a ml) of the tincture, but still be fully functional. Another dropper or three and I best be sitting down. Happily, the “Calibration” step involves lots of periodic and systematic sampling. Good Times. Lol.
And that is exactly where the “Stupid” comes into this story. In the process of sampling this morning I accidentally spilled a tiny splash of Cafe con Leche into the Hilda tincture jar. I watched in horror as the entire Hilda tincture reacted by turning a putrid green snot color.
To make matters worse, this green mucus cloud was opaque and it highlighted the amount of large & small “Tar Bubbles” that were floating in this poisonous tincture soup.
THE HORROR! Feel free to chuckle, you know this could be you…
Before my mistake, the tincture was bright green and clear. I noticed the, the oily dark bubbles in the bottom, but didn’t pay much attention at the time. They were already there before my knucklehead moment.
That is one big floaty ball of something.
So, mea culpa, for tossing milky caffeine into the mix, but what the hell are those tar bubbles?
The globs, large & small are sticky as hell. The little ones seem to go in and out of solution with the alcohol. I may dunk a long handled cotton swab in there and collect some sample tar balls before dumping the gack.
Only difference I can think of is that green buds were decarbed then immediately frozen for months. Could that cause THC oil to precipitate out of the tincture solution?
What other “Oil” could those blobs be?
Apologies for being so long winded here, questions or explanations welcomed.
-Grouchy
PS, as always, Thx to @ReikoX for hosting this forum.
Probably THC oil, yep. Milk is an emulsifier, so basically, you accidentally performed this experiment:
At concentrations of ethanol higher than 40%, each of the emulsions showed an increase in droplet size and eventually became unstable, which is the reason behind the high standard deviation reported for those samples.
I’ve seen the same in my CBD tincture recently but to a much lesser extent. It freaked me out somewhat as well as I’ve never seen any signs of dissociation previously.
Cheers
G
That’s exactly what happens when you use a low proof alcohol to make the tinilcture. It’s basically excess water. Water and oil don’t mix, those globules are basically RSO.
Thx @ReikoX, I’d never heard that before. I used the same Everclear I always use, so I wonder if this had something to do the prolonged freezing after decarb?
Is there any chance that there could be something useful here, a path to RSO without a hydraulic press?
I decided to evap the bad batch all the way down so I could get a good look at the remaining oil.
@ReikoX rso run was a success ended up with around 45-50 grams of rso from about 600-650 grams of trim and outdoor material some real potent stuff my mother enjoys it at night for sleep thankful I can make it for her now going forward going to try to grow some cbd cultivars and make some cbd dominant rso so she might be able to take some during the day without getting completely stoned 
@JoeCrowe night find this interesting or at least a bit funny.lol. Sorry about your loss man. Maybe you can salvage something just because of the oil/water situation.
My “disaster” of a tincture experiment is complete and the results are interesting.
I evaporated everything but the residual water and the result is weirdly beautiful.
There is a whole bunch of black tar down there! Based on folks who know better than I, all that dark matter is oil, RSO-style. The remaining liquid is water, I tasted it to be sure. Pretty sure I can just pour it off at this point.
I also think I know where the water came into the picture. I typically decarb in a sealed Ball Jar, because it seems to preserve the volatile terps. During that process, the water vapor is also driven out of the herb and it condenses on the glass jar.
I normally work with dried and cured herb so there isn’t much moisture to begin with. The “Problem” batch shown above was fresh green bud that was decarbed for a bubble hash run at harvest, then frozen for a couple months. All that un-dried, un-cured, green bud moisture, still present when the decarb jar was sealed, was retained in the thawed buds I ground up for tincture. I think that was the excess moisture that allowed the oils to consolidate into the blobs pictured. I think that was what @reikox was saying here.
Instead of using low proof alcohol, I was using green bud and saving all that humidity/water.
I’m satisfied that’s what went wrong this run, but I still ended up with a big wad of RSO. I don’t dab, my aging lungs complain, so I don’t have much use for the gob of oil that resulted but I wonder what would happen if I poured off that water and added enough everclear to steer it back toward a “Knock Out Drops” concentrate?
Would you Dabber-folk smoke a gob of that black tar? I know the chems in the intended tincture are top shelf, would they still reside in this oddball RSO? 
I’d dab it! Well, at least once 
This is interesting because I just used some fresh frozen weed that I had forgotten to wash when I harvested. Had mites earlier, and used that MTA, and there was some residue… not to mention the dead mites and eggs 
I was trying to keep the stuff un-decarbed for a THCA for a friend with Parkinson’s, another who doesn’t like to get high but has bad sciatica. I used SSDD which really helps mine.
I let it drip dry after washing, but it was still pretty soggy.
I was afraid if I really let it dry out, it would start decarbing. It’s been in freezer for a day in 190. My sciatica buddy has lung issues, so he can’t dab… the Parkinson’s guy is a smokestak. So, at least whatever turns out, it will be used I’ll report back.
If dabbing and vaping are out, how about mixing it into your salad dressing?
Cheers
G
Cocktails work too! Other than cookies, I’m reluctant to put into foodstuffs, just seems too hard to control, but IDK. Do you do the salad dressing? If you do, is it easy to titrate? I’ve over-edibled
I got RSO gelcap pills from a dispo once, just caps with a schmear of black gunk in each one, effects were decent 
The rest of this tincture run was very successful:
“0.5d” on the labels is an indication that half a dropper is enough to let you know it’s onboard! Beyond that, the Maps end abruptly.
During testing I mistakenly did two full droppers of this Gorilla Grove tinc in a glass of red wine and I was seriously wired and couch locked for three hours! Yipes! 
The White Widow is mellow and friendly. One dropper relieves the back pain without a loss of energy or focus. Four ounces of WW tinc from about eight grams of bud seems like a fair yield.
I don’t have dabbing equioment so I’ll try a dribble of the black tar on some mild bud in the pipe and see how it goes!
Biological and Chemical Evaluation of a 43-Year-Old Sample of Cannabis Fluidextract.
We now report the preliminary results of studies on a 43-year-old sample of Cannabis fluidextract. We found that this preparation, in spite of the long shelf storage, still contained enough biological activity to conform with the requirements of USP X (I). Furthermore, TLC and GLC showed the presence of cannabidiol, ▲’1-tetrahydrocannabinol, and cannabinol in significant amounts.
Biological and Chemical Evaluation of a 43-Year-Old Sample of Cannabis Fluidextract (2).pdf (219.9 KB)
I would evaporate all of the water, then add alcohol to make tincture. Again, this is what I suggest for lower proof alcohol.
And that is just what I did!
My ignorance and absence of Dab tools led me to just take a tiny budlet and sort of gob it into the oil at the bottom of the jar. To my surprise that picked up a 3mm blob clean off the glass and into the pipe it went.
Wowzer! 
So that’s the outcome of this accident, once all the alcohol was gone, I poured off the remaining water and this very potent oil remains. Can anyone tell if the oil in the bottom of that jar is a reasonable yield for 8gr of weed? That gob in the middle has some mass to it and the bit I pulled off didn’t even make a dent.
For The Record: this tincture was made with Frankies Daughter Hilda Backcross and the unique character of the high was identical to my Original Frankie clone bud… On steroids.
For my purposes, I think I’ll add back enough Everclear to recreate this as a tincture and see how it ages.
Thanks to all for helping me sort this out.
-Grouchy 
PS, Hello @ReikoX,
Thanks again for hosting this thread. I am laughing, because I was writing the above as you were writing this:
I guessed that would be your advice. In fact, you had this sorted correctly from your first comment. Bravo Maestro!
It really depends on the starting material and how you do the extraction, but maybe this will help…
Let’s assume the starting material was 20% THC and was all buds:
8 g x 0.20 = 1.6 g total THC available
You probably only extracted about 50% of the total THC:
1.6 / 2 = 0.8 grams extracted
Depending on how you did the extraction, it might be 50% THC. The rest is plant fats, waxes, etc:
0.8 * 2 = 1.6 g yield (1600 mg oil, 800 mg THC)
