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From Hemp to CBD Relief

  • Pam Kasey

    • Omni Organics processes raw hemp into KaKu CBD oils and topicals at a lab right here in Morgantown. Here’s how they do it.

    Extracting cannabidiol and terpenes from hemp and processing them into oils and topicals is part labwork, part craft. The guys making KaKu products at Omni Organics gave us a tour of their set-up.

    Steps 1 through 4
    Step 1: Hemp arrives at the facility in 300- to 350-pound supersacks.
    Step 2: The shucked flower in the supersacks is free of most of the stems.
    Step 3: A mill grinds the plant material …
    Step 4: … to a uniform fine powder.

    Steps 5 through 8
    Step 5: The powder is double-bagged, submerged in ethanol in a centrifuge, and agitated for an hour, drawing 90 percent or more of the cannabinoids in the plant material into solution. From the centrifuge, the solution is transferred to first one stainless steel vessel, then a second, through a 5-micron, then a 1-micron polypropylene filter.
    Step 6: The first of three distillations takes place in a falling film distiller that removes most of the ethanol, leaving only enough to keep the solution from being too thick to work with in the winterizing and filtration that follow.
    Step 7: The concentrated ethanol–cannabinoid solution is transferred to standard beer kegs and held in a freezer for 24 hours to congeal the lipids. It’s called “winterizing,” but it’s actually much, much colder than winter.
    Step 8: The winterized solution is filtered through activated carbon to remove off-flavors.

    Steps 9 through 13
    Step 9: Then, the second distillation—“rotovap”—spins the solution over a hot water bath to remove the remaining ethanol, taking a fluid 10 gallons down to a thick 0.4 gallons.
    Step 10: Thick and gooey.
    Step 11: This crude CBD oil is further purified in a third “wiped film” distiller.
    Step 12: The full-spectrum CBD distillate looks like honey. It goes into KaKu CBD oils.
    Step 13: The distillate also can be converted to pure CBD isolate—nothing but cannabidiol. That’s done in a reaction vessel, where the CBD is crystallized and collected. The isolate goes into KaKu topical products.

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