After weeks of harvesting, our drying barn is filled with thousands of boxes of cured hemp flower. It will take months to process this dense, potent biomass. Batch by batch, we truck the hemp over to our state-of-the-art extraction lab, just a few hundred feet away.
The process of extracting the cannabinoids necessary to ultimately craft our entire suite of CBD products requires a bit of a science lesson. Much like the extraction process itself, we’re here to break it down for you.
How extraction works
The first step is to transfer the hemp flower into large mesh bags — think really big zippered tea bags — which are then loaded into 100-gallon stainless steel centrifuges. Utilizing organic, kosher ethanol to physically and chemically remove the trichomes from the hemp plant matter, the cannabinoids are released to the extract. We chill the ethanol to -40°C and then pump it into the centrifuges, where it cycles through the plant matter at high speeds for a short residence time (the amount of time the extract sits in the solvent). The extreme cold of the solvent allows for our ethanol to be more effective in extracting the cannabinoid and terpene-rich fats from the plant matter.
The resulting liquid is a mixture of ethanol, dissolved fats, cannabinoids, terpenes, and flavonoids, which we pump through a selective filtration system, separating the undesired extracted compounds from the extract. It’s a complex process that involves close monitoring of residence time, volume, pressure, temperature, and a hefty filtration system.
Organic from start to finish
In between extraction batches of conventional and USDA organic biomass, we use organic ethanol to rinse our production system according to Oregon Tilth Certified Organic (OTCO) regulations. When organic ethanol is used in a cleaning cycle after a conventional extraction run, that ethanol is no longer viable for use in an organic extraction. An important part of making organic products is making sure that each stage of the process uses all organic inputs, and that includes the solvent used for extraction.
On the road
Once the extraction process is complete - we have created a tank full of dark, sticky, molasses-looking crude oil. This oil is a complex matrix composed of cannabinoids and an earthy aroma of terpenes and grassy, fatty compounds. But it’s not quite ready for making finished products yet.
We load it onto our truck and ship it to our original manufacturing facility, located in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, WA. This is the first time our hemp will leave the farm. Once landed, our manufacturing lab team refines it into one of the several ingredients for our products.
What happens to all that ethanol that we’ve used to extract the oils? We don’t throw it away. We filter and redistill it for use in subsequent extractions
Cleaning is a big part of the extraction process - much like during harvest - it’s a constant battle to keep centrifuges and downstream processing equipment clean of all the sticky, fibrous material running through it. We follow strict cleaning and safety protocols to keep our extraction team safe and the lab running smoothly.
Distillation time
By the time the crude hemp extract arrives in Seattle, our team already has a lot of information about each tote. We know if it’s high in CBD or CBG content, and have decided if it’s going to end up being used for Full Spectrum hemp extract or crystallized into an isolate.
We prep each tote by enclosing it in a heated jacket. Like any fatty substance, hemp crude oil gets thick and hard to pour when cold. We heat the tote and the material within, lowering the crude’s viscosity so we can pump it out and begin the distillation process.
Put simply, distillation is the process of separating a liquid mixture into components by precise boiling and condensation. In the case of our hemp crude, we carefully monitor the temperature and pressure to boil out our remaining ethanol so that only our solvent-free, full spectrum hemp extract remains. This process also decarboxylates the oil. Decarboxylation is an essential step in producing our full spectrum hemp extract, and entails exposure to temperatures up to 130 °C under vacuum conditions. When you decarboxylate, you essentially activate those cannabinoids that otherwise wouldn’t be bioavailable.
After several hours of distillation, we finally have an oil that is ready for consumption. The resulting liquid is our full spectrum hemp extract that is the lifeblood of many of our products, including tinctures.
The next step - making Cannabinoid-Rich Distillate
The work of our distillation team doesn’t stop there. Many of our products require additional refinement in order to create the formulations that our customers know and love. So while some of that full spectrum hemp extract is ready to be shipped to Portland to be mixed into finished products — some of it stays in Seattle for additional refinement.
This additional distillation fractionates out cannabinoids, effectively removing both the volatile plant compounds (i.e. terpenes) that give the oil its characteristic fragrance, as well as the non-volatile components that give it the characteristic dark, molassy color. Through this process we can produce a more consistent cannabinoid-rich oil for certain products — like our topicals.
There are many variables from harvest lot to harvest lot, and that variation affects how things are processed downstream. In order to ensure consistency in the output, our team must fine-tune parameters to account for this. The product will have far less terpene content than our full spectrum hemp extract but is still full spectrum and rich in cannabinoids — including CBD, THC, CBG, CBC — with a golden amber hue.
Final processing - Purification by Crystallization
The final step of refinement we take for our products is crystallization. Making the fluffy, pure isolate requires dissolving our cannabinoid-rich distillate in a nonpolar solvent. Processing the solution at specific temperatures causes the dominant cannabinoid in the mixture to precipitate. As the target cannabinoid precipitates, these molecules come together to form crystals. Soon the crystallization reactor is filled with a “slurry”, a suspension of cannabinoid crystals in a solution of solvent and impurities. We filter off these crystals and clean them up before removing them from the reactor, after which any remaining solvent is removed in our vacuum drying oven. We then package the isolate in barrels and ship it to Portland for use in our isolate products.
Testing, testing testing
An important step, or series of steps, throughout this complex process of extraction and distillation is internal testing. We take great pride in making sure that our oils are safe, potent, and far-exceed the required safety thresholds of metals or pesticides. Testing is also strategic, it allows us to look at the cannabinoid profiles of our concentrates in order to determine appropriate product matches and gives us a chance to test out small-scale formulations in order to preview the products we intend to make at production-scale. And it enables us to ensure that all the products we make start with the most efficacious, highest quality hemp extracts on the market.