WOW thanks everyone. My MBM2 came in yesterday. All of your input and experience is SO invaluable here. Again thanks to you and to AFN in general.
Sat I will make my first tincture. I have the 190 Everclear. I'll let you know.
@SPZ you got to look at this thread.
Thanks for the call, just finished up reading all 36 pages LOL! Great thread lots of great info to research. I make edibles for my ski and bike expositions (they last a long time plus something seems wrong about stopping your workout to smoke lol). I have never used the MB machine but I will share my own experience with tinctures....
I have friend who is not much of a toker, but he is an avid beer brewer. He usually makes 30-50 gallons of beer at a whack and we have started treating some of it with tinctures to make what we "efficacious ale". We have been doing this for a few years now experimenting with different techniques. Our main goal is to eliminate the taste, especially the chlorophyll taste, from the tincture so it does not contaminate the beer, while maintaining the correct psychoactive effect with proper dosing in each bottle. This is not home brew swill--my friend takes pride in his work and he has a very good palate, the flavor from the tincture must be non-existent or highly complimentary to the specific beer. Usually hoppy beers compliment the taste better and malty and subtle beers are almost a non-starter.
Here is the recipe we use:
- Grind bud or trim to a flour
- Decarb in oven for 50 minutes at 225F
- Cover bud with everclear
- Allow to steep for about one week
- Filter alcohol from bud using coffee filter
- Rinse filtered bud thoroughly with vodka (don't need to waste everclear for this step) and add rinse to tincture (lots of good stuff is left behind in filtered buds and needs to be rinsed out, we found out the hard way by drinking the rinse and OD'ing once)
- Do not evaporate or cook down, you will get sludge coming out of suspension and it won't mix with the beer correctly
- Use syringe to add measured amount to each bottle prior to capping, we have learned that mixing all of the tincture into the keg results in uneven dosage. We've used anywhere from 1/4 oz bud to one ounce of trim per five gallons of beer, depending on the desired effect.
This is an experimental run I just did, we are trying several new techniques head-to-head to minimize the flavor without affecting potency.
A. Control batch, using standard recipe above
B. Same as control batch, but trim was blanched for five minutes in 130F water prior to decarb step to minimize taste
C. Trim was not ground, this supposedly minimizes the taste
D. Trim was not ground and was blanched both
E. Same as control batch but steeping was done in freezer which supposedly minimizes taste
Each batch uses exactly 7g trim and 75ml of alcohol so we can compare apples to apples. One thing I've already learned is that it takes a lot more everclear to cover the buds if they are not ground up (like twice as much). So if you want to minimize wasted everclear and don't care about flavor, I'd say you should grind it up first.
We are in the testing phase now, I'll let folks know how it goes!!!!! I also got some great ideas for new experiments from this thread so some more test runs are in order over the summer!! Questions, comments, and recommendations are welcome!!!
