If you have a limited amount of bud or you are looking for something more intense, you might want to consider decarboxylating your bud before grinding and soaking. 255F for 25 minutes is a good way to do this.

Anyway, you must be patient to do a month-long cold extraction!! Cold extractions seem much cleaner and tastier to me, but I don't have the patience to wait that long.

By the way, I wouldn't bother heating to evaporate the alcohol. Just leave the cap off of the bottle and it will evaporate by itself very quickly due to the high volatility of 190 proof ethanol. If you were going to bother with all the heating mess, you could have saved all that time and done a hot extraction to begin with.

Regarding dilution with water in order to not burn your tongue: It is best to store your green dragon in the 190 proof state. But you should dilute individual servings with water or juice right before drinking.


Quote Originally Posted by jsn9333
First, the background, then the question.

I have some ground up bud soaking in 190 proof grain alcohol right now. Been soaking 20 days. I'm going to let it go 10 more days, then start evaporating off the alcohol so I'm left with mostly the canna-oil. I'm going to heat the tincture very slowly, safely, and carefully to about 170 degrees and let the alcohol boil off.

Okay, here's the question. I want to be able to take this tincture under my tongue. However, the alcohol is *very* strong and can burn. I don't want to evaporate all the alcohol off to make sure I don't burn the oil, so I'm just going to evaporate most of it. My question is this:

If I add water to what is left of the tinture so that it dilutes the remaining alcohol, will adding water to the canna-oil harm the tincture? In other words, if I just put the oil itself under my tounge, would that be "stronger" than if I added a few tablespoons of water and swished it around in my mouth, let it soak under my tongue, etc. and swallowed it. I just want to make sure I don't ruin my 30 days worth of work. This is my first time making a tincture.

Thanks and Peace!



P.S. - note to moderators since I know this place gets legalistic about certain drugs... I'm not *drinking* the alcohol, I'm only using it to extract the medical compounds from the cannabis.