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Over the years
we have been asked many questions about extraction methods
and extracts. I have put this explanation together to answer
those questions.
I have also added a brief explanation that leads to the
reasoning behind our new method of extraction along with the
design of the equipment that we had to develop to make it
all happen..
We DO NOT carry
Crude Extracts. Crude and Regular Extracts are weaker and
contain inconsistent amounts of Salvinorin-A. Neither do we
carry Standardized Extracts. We have developed a special
method and equipment so that you can get the quality of
standardized and the strength of crude. This may sound like
absurd statements but read all the way through to fully
understand the reasoning.
WHAT
EXACTLY IS A STANDARDIZED EXTRACT AND A CRUDE EXTRACT?
Standardized
extractions have grown in popularity because of the garage
type labs and home based extraction procedures. They were
inefficient and easy to do, As the demand for higher
strength extracts grew, the crude extractors cut corners to
save time and money.
Because of the loss of salvinorin A and low quality due to
various methods customers began to demand that they get a
standardized amount of salvinorin A deposited on the leaf to
ensure they are getting what they pay for.
A standardized extract is one in
which the active compound - in this case salvinorin-A - is
extracted from the plant and isolated, weighed and then
redeposited back onto the dried leaves at a specific amount.
In the case of Salvia extracts 2.4 milligrams is considered
the standardized amount to assume a gram of salvia leaf
contains. Therefore if you want to enhance the leaf to 10X
or 10 times stronger, you would add 24 milligrams back onto
dried, ground up leaf material. The standard average amount
was conceived of ?? by ??. Not sure but I am sure that the
quality of leaves has only gotten better. At this point in
time if one were to assume this standard to be correct then
you would be with left over Salvinorin-A crystal after you
placed the amount back onto the leaves. Leaves do not vary
much but if they do then you would have a loss. Not only
could you possibly suffer a loss but it is a worthless
expensive and time consuming step if you have a known and
repeatable process performed with high quality leaf
material. As a matter of fact it is usually only performed
to check quality unless the isolated chemical is needed.
Therefore we stopped standardizing extract shortly after
developing this new process. As most others have. The
cleaning is still performed but not up the point of loss. As
a matter of fact, even our method of cleaning the lipids out
is specific to this new method.
 Pure
crystalline salvinorin-A is a very rare compound that few
people have ever seen and even fewer people have ever
produced. Almost all the other salvia extracts on the market
are crude extracts because of the complexity, time and
expense you have to shell out to isolate a chemical. It
involves a series of washes involving two chemicals that do
not match in their polarity. One polarity of one chemical
attracts the desired salvinorin A. While the polarity of the
other chemical attracts the undesired components.
This mixture is allowed to separate into two layers. The
layers are separated into two parts. This or a similar
process continues up to five or more times to ensure that
all the salvinorin A is extracted from the lipids and that
the Salvinorin-A is isolated enough to get a accurate weight
that only reflects the weight of the Salvinorin-A. The
lipids are discarded each time. That means that you are
throwing away some of the salvinorin A that was lost in the
separation. The system is not perfect. As a matter of fact
you could loose from 20% to 40% depending upon how well you
do your job. This loss is compensated for by charging you
for more leaves to compensate for the loss in the process.
The Salvinorin-A can now be weighed after drying off all the
solvent that was used during the separation performed above.
You can now begin to crystallize the SA if desired. If so
the salvinorin A is again placed in a solution and is now
set into motion to allow the chemical to crystallize. Using
temperature variations you can speed the process but for the
most part time is your friend. Sometimes it begins to happen
immediately. This process as stated above is time consuming
and expensive. The chemicals such as hexane and methanol as
well as naphtha are toxic, very expensive and hard to
locate. These are the chemicals that are used to wash and
isolate the salvia molecule. There are even more harsh
chemicals that can be used. D Limonene shows promising
results.
Basically to
only deposit some of the salvinorin A on the leaf requires
an additional step of purification (isolation) and those
steps of isolation will incur additional cost and will
produce a weaker extract because of the loss during washing
and separation unless more leaves are used which again cost
more. Standardized cost more to produce.
This is what ends up happening when you wash and weigh and
wash and weigh until you get a pure isolated chemical.
Crude extracts and standardized extracts are extracted exactly
the same way. The difference is that crude is not washed or
cleaned as standardized is. All extractions are performed by
soaking the leaves in a variety of solvents to dissolve the
salvinorin-A out of the leaves. The trouble with this is
that a lot more than just the Salvinorin A gets dissolved
out of the leaves, especially if heat is used. Much of the
plant lipids (fat, oil, wax and tar ) get dissolved
in the solvent as well and end up in the extract if it is
not cleaned or standardized. Not to mention sticky
extract is hard to put in a vial or baggie.
This is a large coffee filter that is being
discarded after it was used to filter out a 2 kilo ethanol
extraction of salvia divinorum. The lipid weight came out to
be 75 grams. And this was just the amount we could filter
out after freezing to 20F degrees below zero. These were the
early days of extracting. Luckily only 5x was being made.
This ancient
extraction method ensures that you get all of the
Salvinorin-A out but only if the method that was
incorporated was well done and efficient. Acetone, mild heat
and time is usually used at this point because Acetone will
hold way more salvinorin A per drop than any other solvent.
Remember that heat gets more unwanted lipids out but also
remember that a large portion of the salvinorin A molecule
resides in the lipids and is virtually inseparable without a
wash. Ethanol can be used as well but with slightly less
efficiency.
Some
Popular Solvents
Because of the massive tax on ethanol, even when it is used
it is still denatured or poisoned so that it too is non
consumable. Acetone will evaporate completely with very
little heat applied. Ethanol takes forever to evaporate.
Since a complete evaporation is desired, Acetone is
preferred in the scenario above. Both solvents being
non-consumable.
Acetone extractions are the most efficient means of
extraction for most botanicals. There are other solvents but
they are far more toxic. Most certainly it is the best for
salvia extracts. The polarities of the Salvinorin-A molecule
and the Acetone molecule are perfectly matched. They attract
like magnets. But because acetone is such a good solvent the
lipids are pulled out in abundance. The leaves are literally
leached of everything. They are pale in color after the
extraction process. All life is removed and now rest in a
pool of acetone waiting to be dealt with.
Ethanol / Alcohol extractions are also used but are less
efficient and seem to take just as much lipids out as well
as putting them into an unmanageable gunky state. Ethanol
cost much more than Acetone because of the tax and even
without the tax, and does not seem to pull as much
salvinorin out according to HPLC testing. Not with this
method we use anyway. Some people mix acetone and ethanol
together hoping for better results.
I have heard of many concerns with using certain
non-consumable solvents for extractions that moves me to add
this statement.
Remember that a solvent is chosen because of the high
evaporation rate. It must evaporate off completely and leave
no residue at all. The lower the temperature to evaporate it
the better. No exceptions.
During the pouring and drying of the extracts at 175F,
the chemicals, what ever they may be, are evaporated with
such efficiency that none of the solvent remains to be
weighed with the most sensitive scales.
If you have a solvent that boils at 20F then you can safely
say that at 80F it will surely rapidly and completely
evaporate.
Crude extractions seemed to be manageable for a while. As
long as you were only making 5X and 10X. But
the wet nature of the fats waxes and oils degraded the
quality of the smoke.
As the market grew to desire stronger extracts such as 15X
and 20X it became harder and harder to make extractions that
were clean and lipid free.
With the higher strengths, more lipids and Salvinorin-A were
poured onto fewer leaves to make extracts stronger. This
meant very sticky and dirty extracts if crude methods were
used. It also meant more cost if you wanted to clean it up.
Standardized extracts started looking like the only way to
go. There are many roads to standardization.
Crude extracts were not marketable at all in this new
stronger form of 20X extract.
As you can see from the picture below this crude extraction
is very sticky. And after you pour 50 grams of this onto 50
grams of leaves to make 100 grams of extract it is still not
diluted enough with leaves to be tolerable or manageable.
These are the lipids that can be expected from a single kilo
extraction. The weight can range as high as 75-100 grams of
just lipids alone. Dependant on the quality of the leaves
and the solvent and the temperature and time the process is
allowed to run.
Enough
about Crude methods
A new method
had to be developed or adopted that would eliminate the
expensive steps of the isolation and standardized methods
and at the same time keep the lipids ratio of salvinorin A
to a minimum while still providing a strong extraction such
as found in a crude extraction methods.
We have developed that method.
OUR METHOD OF EXTRACTION
We do not provide Standardization for extractions nor do we
use acetone or ethanol as solvents.
We have eliminated that step and those solvents from the
process with the method and equipment we developed and now
use.
There is no need to standardize and charge for the process
if the process is repeatable. You just do it once and then
you eliminate that step. After you have isolated the
Salvinorin-A and then weighed and measured it and you find
that the end result is the same every time then you can
safely eliminate the isolation, weighing and measuring
phase. This saves you money and saves you time as well. Even
if you are paying for it it is probably not being performed.
Do you taste your tea for strength every time? Of course
not, you know what effects a teaspoon will produce.
With our method
we know that we will get 90-95% of the Salvinorin-A out of
the leaves and onto the final extract / enhanced leaves. The
only thing we need to know is how much salvinorin A is in
the leaves to start with. This can be performed with one
test and it is performed with each new shipment of leaves
from a new supplier. The leaves from any supplier may change
as much as a half milligram. But from shipment to shipment
from the same supplier they do not change much at all if
any. Once a good supply of leaves are found we stick with
it.
Up to 3 milligrams of Salvinorin-A can be expected from a
top quality supplier. If any more than that is claimed, then
it is most likely not a true claim or they are being misled
or they are just using more leaves to extract and get that
much SA out. You will probably be charged for that.
After years of
testing and working with various solvents and equipment we
have discovered and developed a method to produce
extractions that are void of all lipids but still contains
90-95% of all the SA.
Notice how clean the above extraction looks compared to
crude methods as pictured above this picture. You can also
get an idea of the temperature required to accomplish this
if you notice the frost that immediately accumulated on the
glass after exposing it to the humid air. 90% of all
the Salvinorin-A in the leaves was pulled out from the
leaves and retained in this 200 gram test using our new
method and equipment. More than any other standardized
isolation/wash of the same amount of salvia leaves.
This new method of extraction economically and efficiently
produces much higher quality and stronger extracts and
maintains a totally clean waste free extract, all in one
extraction process, with the least loss of salvinorin A - of
any other method bar none. We do this with no heat applied
to the extraction or leaves. And the entire process take
less than 1 hour per 2.5 kilo extraction. Basically we
have discovered how to extract from the leaf material and
the lipids in one process.
By using a special formula of solvents along with
temperature, pressure and time we can control exactly what
and when we will pull out any chemical from just about any
material.
We have tested each and every process over the years. The
resulting data has been duplicated over and over until we
finally began the final development of our design and
extraction equipment. Our final design is now complete and
running beautifully. We call it "The Final Cut".
We borrowed some ideas of the supercritical extractors and
incorporated knowledge and data we gathered over the years
to build a totally new extractor.
WE did not cut corners, we eliminated them.
That was our goal for the past two years.
In the picture above you
can not help but notice the Salvinorin-A crystals adhering
to the outside of these flakes of salvia leaf.
This is 20X extract produced with the
Final Cut process that we have developed and refined over
the past 3 years.
As you can see, the extract is void of all waxes, fats and
oils. This is verified by the pure white crystals of
Salvinorin-A that crystallized onto the outside of the leaf
as the extract cooled down during the drying time.
I think when you receive your extraction order you will no
longer be concerned
with standardized extracts and ethanol or acetone
extractions.
We have spent the last 3 years designing and building
equipment and processes that are specially designed to suit
your needs.
BUY SALVIA
EXTRACTS
BUY SALVIA LEAVES
Lipids are a large class of organic
substances, insoluble in water and greasy to the touch,
including the fats, waxes, oils and sterols.
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