POTENT

POTENT

Potency is a critical component to be considered when selecting your CBD provider. Oftentimes, products are over diluted and manufactured with crude low potency CBD extract. The companies manufacturing these products are prioritizing profits over quality and your health. To them, CBD is CBD; it doesn’t matter which base ingredient supplier they use, as long as it is cheap.

At Cloud CO. Farms we don’t use any suppliers to create our CBD; we do it ourselves from scratch. We also employ a rigorous extraction process which begins with selecting a high quality biomass to extract. In our case, it is our own certified organic biomass that came from our own seeds and was grown ourselves with all the QA/QC procedures that we deploy.

• The biomass is placed into the machine which is back filled with 200 proof alcohol that is chilled to -40 degrees. We use alcohol instead of CO2 or hydrocarbons like butane or propane because it is commercially scalable, adds another layer of quality control (because the pure alcohol sterilizes anything it comes into contact with), and is safer for the work environment our employees operate in.
• The reactor goes through an agitation cycle when full of biomass and alcohol and is then spun out at very high speeds with the centrifuge to collect as much of the cannabinoids as possible that are now suspended in the alcohol solution and removed from the plant material.
• Next the alcohol must be separated from the cannabinoids and collected for re-use. We perform this step using falling film evaporators. This process is simple chemistry and deals with the differing boiling points of the alcohol and cannabinoids. The boiling point of the alcohol is lower than that of the cannabinoids so by heating the solution to a temperature above the boiling point of the alcohol and below the boiling point of the cannabinoids we can successfully separate the two into different collections.
• The alcohol is then used for the next extraction of biomass and the cannabinoid collection moves on to the next step of purification which is called decarboxylation. Decarboxylation is a heat process that we perform in a jacketed glass reactor that removes a carbon atom from a carbon chain which in our case is converting CBD-A (the acid form of the molecule that is present on the plant prior to any heat exposure) to CBD. This process also recovers any trace alcohol that remains to ensure there are no residual solvents.
• The next step is twice distilling the cannabinoid collection to refine it further from a brown, molasses like extract that is in the range of 60% purity to a gold, honey like distillate that is in the range of 90% purity and perform this step using wiped film evaporators. This distillation step is now heating the cannabinoids themselves to their boiling point to separate them from other non-cannabinoid plant constituents like sugars and chlorophyll to achieve a higher level of potency and visual clarity along with that beautiful gold color.