In this video segment, Ben Stephens gives an introduction to the principle and practice of alcohol dominant extraction. He describes why ethanol is one of the most common solvents used over the centuries.

In this video segment, Ben Stephens explains why ethanol is one of the most common solvents used over the centuries. Ethanol is an extremely versatile solvent and is applicable in many applications. Coupling this with how easy it is to manufacture, and how long it has been manufactured, it has made it the ideal candidate throughout the years for various botanical extractions.

In this video segment, Ben Stephens talks about the principles of successful extraction with ethanol. Understanding your inputs, and furthermore controlling them as much as possible, is an integral piece to any extraction process. This can and should include knowing the farms and farmers where your biomass comes from, but it should also include how you process and store your biomass prior to extraction. The main considerations here are ensuring the biomass has been properly and thoroughly cured and dried, is subsequently stored in a temperature controlled and dry environment, and also is consistently milled.

In this video segment, Ben Stephens touches on controlling extraction parameters. Temperature and residency time are the most important variables during ethanol extraction. Changing and maintaining the temperature of your solvent during extraction is vital because it changes what compounds your ethanol will target and how fast (dictating your optimal residency time) it will dissolve them.

In this video segment, Ben Stephens addresses the problems pertaining to ethanol. One of the biggest challenges faced by ethanol processors who intend to operate at a large scale is solvent recovery. Ethanol is an enormously efficient solvent, and will allow you to process more biomass than perhaps any other methods currently on the market, if you have the ability to evaporate and recover that amount of solvent at scale.

In this video segment, Ben Stephens goes in depth on the entire process of full ethanol processing. Understanding and controlling your inputs are vital pieces of any extraction process. Perhaps the most vital piece is understanding how your biomass was grown and how it was handled prior to your lab. For large scale producers who are mostly aiming to produce distillate or isolate, there is a golden ratio between what their biomass costs by weight, and how potent or how much cannabinoids are present in it. For them, purchasing trim is usually the best option because it is cheaper than buds and flowers but still has adequate quantities of their desired compounds.

In this video segment, Ben Stephens dives into plant processing. In any industrial processing setting, especially at scale, the main goal is to minimize variables to create the most consistent product desired. We’ve already briefly touched on some of the most important, such as temperature and biomass preparation. When it comes to ethanol, the ability to dissolve both polar and non-polar compounds from the plant comes with a set of benefits as well as a set of complications. One of the potential complications with cannabis processing is that the main target compounds are primarily non-polar. Under certain circumstances ethanol can pick up some undesirable compounds that are polar, causing more processing steps.

In this video segment, Ben Stephens breaks down developing a financial model for ethanol extraction. There is always a golden ratio for processors between the price and potency of their inputs. This is why it is advantageous when processing at a large scale and with specific end products (isolate, distillate) in mind to do a cost analysis on the price per mg of active compounds (CBD or THC for example) in your inputs. Although their inputs, especially when their end product requires high contents of terpenes, are on average much more expensive, so are their retail prices for their end products.