Cannabutter - Not Sure What Went Wrong

So this is my first batch of cannabutter with coconut oil.

What I did:
-First I ground my trim up (3 lbs), and put them in a large pan.

-Then I melted 120 oz of coconut oil, and dumped it in, microwaved it to be good and hot.

-Then I added boiling hot water until it turned into a thick soup.

-Let it simmer for 2-3 hours while covered.

-Filtered it all into a pillow case and squeezed it out pretty good.

-Dumped another bit of boiling water into and squeezed it out a second time.

-I let the water/oil cool down, to collect the hardened coconut oil. I managed to get ~30 oz of nice bright green and potent butter.

But what happened to my other 90 oz of organic coconut oil? That stuff ain't cheap and I've never had a similar issue with regular butter, except maybe a 10-15% loss.

Should I add more oil and re-boil, hopefully getting back all the missing oil, or just add water and re-boil it a second time?

I pressed it as hard as possible, I even set the pillowcase into a bucket, and stood on it a for a few minutes to squeeze out those last drops.

Any input/advice is appreciated!

 

If you soaked your trim in hot water again you might get some of the oil back.

 

I don't understand this adding water...is that something you do with coconut oil?

I do know this for a fact - butter, or a similar type substance like coconut oil (or peanut butter or cashew butter) combined with heat does draw out the thc in weed.

Water, hot or not, does NOT draw the thc out of weed, and its thc that gets a person high...that is why you don't hear anybody talking about drinking weed tea and getting high.

If what you have gets you high, I say you did good...especially using water in the mix.

 

Oh its a common cannabutter process, most recipes for it seem to do it this way...

1) Boil a pot of water.
2) Add butter, let it melt it.
3) Dump in green products.
4) Simmer for X hours.
5) Filter, while still warm.
6) Allow to cool.

When it cools, the oil and water separate, and the butter creates a hard disc on the surface. The issue I've found is the leaf material is holding onto my oil, and I need to figure out a way to properly press it. Every time I add hot water and boil it, I get a few ounces of oil back. But when I squeeze the material really hard I get much more.

Apparently people use a ricer or french press to press out the oils if they care about getting better than 50% yield... Doesn't really seem that practical for any decently large scale of processing of trim. I suppose one might just be better off making something like bulk qwiso/qwet and then adding the to oils for edibles as needed...

 

I don't understand the water. Or why you used coconut oil, to make alleged butter.

I know some do, but I wouldn't microwave it, either. More radiation would seem to mean less cannabinoids.

I'm not even seeing where you added the butter, in your description.

But assuming you added and removed butter, it's pretty fucking obvious what happened to the oil. All the polar stuff mixed, your butter contains the coconut oil as well.

I mean, you do know that you need to add butter, right? It doesn't like, come from the weed.... it's real butter, not a slang term. If you didn't add any what you have is all coconut oil.

 

In this batch I have only put coconut oil. I am using coconut oil because it has more saturated fats, thus holds more THC and is more efficient solvent than regular butter. Coconut oil also is a a solid at room temp, stays good a lot longer than butter and is more bio-available making the result more potent than if using other oils.

The addition of water does multiple things. It regulates the temperature during a long simmer time, ensuring you don't burn the oil or weed or start vaporizing off your goods. It also absorbs lots of the bad stuff, like fertilizers, plant waxes, chlorophyll, that would all end up in the oil if you didn't use water, it also helps make the resulting oil more palatable and milder in flavor.

The oil and water should not be able to 'mix', the issue I am having is that my dry plant matter absorbed and is retaining 75% of my oil I added (coconut oil), in step (2) in my first post. I have tried adding multiple washes of boiling hot water, or re-boiling all the plant matter that is oil saturated, but each time I only get out a few more oz's, it would take weeks of boiling and pressing to get it all back at this rate.

Re-read my first post, I added 120 oz of coconut oil, that is 7.5 lbs of oil. Coconut oil is quite like butter, it is a solid at room temperature or in the fridge and melts around 80 degrees F. But after letting the extract cool, I only recovered 30 oz of that said coconut oil, about 75% losses of oil to the plant matter. Apparently I need to come up with some kind of method to seriously press out the butter.