Step 2: PROCESSING YOUR FLOWER
Step 2: Making your Flower Useful
Now that you have your flower, the next step is to activate it and then turn it into oil for consumption.
Overall, making CBD tinctures (and other items) at home is fairly affordable. The biggest leap of faith in my process is purchasing your main piece of equipment which covers both the decarb process and oil infusion process. However, keep in mind that the retail price for the same item that I am going to teach you how to make can cost anywhere from $35-$85 a bottle.
This important piece of equipment is the Ardent FX or Ardent Mini. It is truly an amazing and magical invention. I am in fact an Ardent partner and it's because I strongly believe in the product. It performs well in that it is a true push-button set-it-and-forget-it device designed for the consumer. Historically, to create something like a CBD oil tincture, you would have to use an oven to bake your flower and then use a pot to cook the oil and flower. This produced a strong odor, required a lot of cleanup, was not discrete, and also did not easily allow for flexible quantities. This especially was not conducive to small one-bottle batches. Additionally, decarbing accurately and precisely in an oven can take a bit of trial and error depending on the oven and be challenging for a newbie. I can't speak enough of how easy to use the Ardent product is and how much it will continue to help to expand the cannabis and hemp community because of this. I will also point out that it utilizes food-grade stainless steel. You can buy it directly from the Ardent website and on Amazon at the links below:
Ardent FX or Mini from Ardent Directly - HERE
Ardent FX Mini on Amazon - HERE
As an oversimplification, here are the main parts of this step (2):
- "Decarb" or Decarboxylation - Heating the flower for the appropriate temperature and duration to activate the properties of cannabinoids in that flower. Once this is completed it is ready to be consumed. Think of this step as an on/off switch. Without the decarb process, unless you smoke it, your flower is "off" and it is essentially useless.
- Oil Infusion - Now that the flower is active, we will add it directly to the oil. During this process, when heated, all of the activated molecules jump off of the flower and cling to the fat (the oil). Once completed, the flower is filtered out and discarded.
Once you have your Ardent FX or Ardent FX Mini in hand and ready to go. You will need to gather the following supplies and incredients:
Supplies:
- Glass bottles with rubber tops and droppers
- Glass jar for oil heating (that fits in the Ardent FX or mini) - I suggest cleaning and using a jam jar as there are many that seem to fix easily
- 1 oz jar funnel
- Small screen for matter filtering - I simply use a tea strainer and break off the pieces and flip one side (noted in pics below)
- 50ml Graduated Cyliner for measuring the oil
- Gram Scale for weighing your flower
Ingredients:
Let's get started!
1. Prepare your clean glass containers, droppers and bottles by sanitizing. The way I do this is to simply boil water in a pot, drop in your glass jar, glass bottle and droppers. Let them boil for about 5 minutes, remove and let them dry. It is important to do this step first so that there is enough time for them to fully dry. These items will need to be fully dry before used. For the rubber tops, I generally clean them and then dip them in the boil water for about 20-30 seconds.
2. Let's begin with the math to start the first step, which is to measure out your flower using your gram scale. We are working with mililiters (ml) for volume and milligrams (mg) for weight and using numbers in mutiples of 5 and 10 to make things as easy as possible.
- Each standard dropper bottle holds maximum of 30 mL (1 oz.) of oil.
- I generally plan for 25ml of final product per bottle.
- Each full dropper is 1 ml of oil (picture below). I do not recommend using droppers with number markings as I have seen the writing come off into the oil (yikes).
- I follow an industry standard which is generally aim to make one full dropper contain around 10 mg/ml of CBD so it's easy to dose (1/4 dropper = 2.5ml of CBD, 1/2 dropper = 5ml of CBD etc.). This amount provides you with a 250mg of cbd total per bottle.
With those standards, the next thing that you need to do is know the "strength" or CBDA content of the flower. This will be communicated in a percentage that you need to change to a total. It will also be on the lab sheets as well. That number represents a percentage of CBD per each measured mg. Therefore if your flower is 21.5% CBDA strength (cbda is cbd's chemical state before the decarb is completed), then you use the number 215mg of CBD per gram to complete your math.
As an example, if your flower is "21.5%" strength (215mg cbd per gram or 1000 mg) and you would like to achieve 250mg of cbd per bottle . Here is the math -
- We know that 250mg (total cbd per bottle) divided by 25ml (total volume of oil per bottle) = 10mg/1ml (full dropper = 10mg of cbd)
- Therefore we need to know how many grams of flower to measure out to achieve 250mg of cbd. In the example case above of the 21.5% flower, we simply devide 250 by 215, which equals 1.25. So you need to measure out 1.25 grams of flower and drop it all into the FX.
I have added a TLDR read chart below for measuring your flower to achieve 250 mg total CBD per bottle with 25 ml oil with a 10mg/ml dropper strength. If you simply want to use that chart to adjust your flower you can easily produce this recipe without much math.
If you don't want to do any math, in summary:
1. Measure a total of 25ml of avocado oil
2. Based on the strength of your flower, use the below chart to measure your flower in grams
3. When completed, your oil strength contains 10 milligrams of CBD for each full dropper.
Once measured, place the flower into the Ardent machine. Ardent suggests popcorn sized pieces, in most cases you can drop it in as is. Now select "A1" and press start to begin the decarb process (I recommend using the A1 setting for all CBD processes in general). You will be see a red light while the process occurs. Once the decarb is done, you will see a green light. It's fine to leave the decarbed flower in the unit for now and proceed to step 3.
3. Next measure out your oil into your glass jar to 25ml. Add around a "pinch" (1/16-1/8 teaspoon) of the Sunflower Lecithin and stir them together well. Next, you will need to add the flower. You can take the buds and essentially rub your fingers together to remove the stems. Discard the stems. Your flower should ideally be broken up with your fingers to be as small as possible without too much effort. You simply drop the pieces into the oil mixture and make sure that it is all fully submerged. Place the glass jar in the Ardent unit. Begin the A1 setting again. This time, when the jar and oil is heated, all of the active ingredients in the flower will transfer from the flower matter to the oil.
4. Once this cycle is complete, simply put a funnel and small strainer over your glass dropper bottle and pour it in. Next put your dropper into the rubber top and seal it up. You're done. You can discard the flower. Label your bottle so that you know the strain and the date that it was made. The general rule in retail is that it will expire after 1 year. Personally, I would not worry about it spoiling at exactly one year but I would plan to keep it for a maximum of 2 years.
