Summary of the Final Cut process of extractions can be located on the latest news page by clicking here

Over the years we have been asked many questions about extraction methods and extracts. I have put this explanation together to answer those questions.

I have also added a brief explantion that leads to the reasoning behind our new method of extraction along with the design of the equipment that we had to develop to make it all happen..

We DO NOT carry Crude Extracts. Crude and Regular Extracts are weaker and contain inconsistent amounts of Salvinorin-A. Neither do we carry Standardized Extracts. We have developed a special method and equipment so that you can get the quality of standardized and the strength of crude. This may sound like absurd statements but read all the way through to fully understand the reasoning.

WHAT EXACTLY IS A STANDARDIZED EXTRACT AND A CRUDE EXTRACT?
Standardized extractions have grown in popularity because of the garage type labs and home based extraction procedures. They were inefficient and easy to do, As the demand for higher strength extracts grew, the crude extractors cut corners to save time and money.
Because of the loss of salvinorin A and low quality due to various methods customers began to demand that they get a standardized amount of salvinorin A deposited on the leaf to ensure they are getting what they pay for.

A standardized extract is one in which the active compound - in this case salvinorin-A - is extracted from the plant and isolated, weighed and then redeposited back onto the dried leaves at a specific amount. In the case of Salvia extracts 2.4 milligrams is considered the standardized amount to assume a gram of salvia leaf contains. Therefore if you want to enhance the leaf to 10X or 10 times stronger, you would add 24 milligrams back onto dried, ground up leaf material. The standard average amount was conceived of ?? by ??. Not sure but I am sure that the quality of leaves has only gotten better. At this point in time if one were to assume this standard to be correct then you would be with left over Salvinorin-A crystal after you placed the amount back onto the leaves. Leaves do not vary much but if they do then you would have a loss. Not only could you possibly suffer a loss but it is a worthless expensive and time consuming step if you have a known and reapeatable process performed with high quality leaf material. As a matter of fact it is usually only performed to check quality unless the isolated chemical is needed.
Therefore we stopped standardizing extract shortly after developing this new process. As most others have. The cleaning is still peformed but not up the point of loss. As a matter of fact, even our method of cleaning the lipids out is specific to this new method.

This photo was taken in a series of photos of an extraction performed by
Christopher Hazlitt
Pure crystalline salvinorin-A is a very rare compound that few people have ever seen and even fewer people have ever produced. Almost all the other salvia extracts on the market are crude extracts because of the complexity, time and expense you have to shell out to isolate a chemical. It involves a series of washes involving two chemicals that do not match in their polarity. One polarity of one chemical attracts the desired salvinorin A. While the polarity of the other chemical attracts the undesired lipids. This mixture is allowed to separate into two layers. The layers are separated into two parts. This or a similar process continues up to five times to ensure that all the salvinorin A is ripped from the lipids and that the Salvinorin-A is isolated enough to get a accurate weight that only reflects the weight of the Salvinorin-A. The lipids are discarded each time. That means that you are throwing away some of the salvinorin A that was lost in the separation. The system is not perfect. As a matter of fact you could loose from 20% to 40% depending upon how well you do your job. This loss is compensated for by charging you for more leaves to compensate for the loss in the process.
I wonder if it is this stage that the average of 2.4 milligrams was discovered. :o)

The Salvinorin-A can now be weighed after drying off all the solvent that was used during the separation peformed above.
You can now begin to cyrstallize the SA if desired. If so the salvinorin A is again placed in a solution and is now set into motion to allow the chemical to crystallize. Using temperature variations you can speed the process but for the most part time is your friend. Sometimes it begins to happen immediately. This process as stated above is time consuming and expensive. The chemicals such as hexane and methanol as well as naptha are toxic, very expensive and hard to locate. These are the chemicals that are used to wash and isolate the salvia molecule. There are even more harsh chemicals that can be used.

Basically to only deposit some of the salvinorin A on the leaf requires an additional step of purification (isolation) and those steps of isolation will incur additional cost and will produce a weaker extract because of the loss during washing and separation unless more leaves are used which again cost more. Standardized cost more to produce.
This is what ends up happening when you wash and weigh and wash and weigh until you get a pure isolated chemical.

Crude extracts and standardized extracts are extracted exactly the same way. The difference is that crude is not washed or cleaned as standardized is. All extractions are peformed by soaking the leaves in a variety of solvents to dissolve the salvinorin-A out of the leaves. The trouble with this is that a lot more than just the Salvinorin A gets dissolved out of the leaves, much of the plant lipids (fat, oil, wax and tar ) get dissolved in the solvent as well and end up in the extract and subsequently in your lungs if it is not standardized.
Not to mention sticky extract is hard to put in a vial or baggie.


This is a large coffee filter that is being discarded after it was used to filter out a 2 kilo ethanol extraction of salvia divinorum. The lipid weight came out to be 75 grams. And this was just the amount we could filter out after freezingto 20F degrees below zero. These were the early days of extracting. Luckily only 5x was being made.

This ancient extraction method ensures that you get all of the Salvinorin-A out but only if the method that was incorporated was well done and efficient. Acetone, mild heat and time is usually used at this point because Acetone will hold way more salvinorin A per drop than any other solvent. Remember that heat gets more unwanted lipids out but also remember that a large portion of the salvinorin A molecule resides in the lipids and is virtually inseparable without a wash. Ethanol can be used as well but with slightly less efficiency.

Some Popular Solvents

Because of the massive tax on ethanol, even when it is used it is still denatured or poisoned so that it too is non consumable. Acetone will evaporate completely with very little heat applied. Ethanol takes forever to evaporate. Since a complete evaporation is desired, Acetone is preferred in the scenario above. Both solvents being non-consumable.

Acetone extractions are the most efficient means of extraction for most botanicals. There are other solvents but they are far more toxic. Most certainly it is the best for salvia extracts. The polarities of the Salvinroin-A molecule and the Acetone molecule are perfectly matched. They attract like magnets. But because acetone is such a good solvent the lipids are pulled out in abundance. The leaves are literally leached of everything. They are pale in color after the extraction process. All life is removed and now rest in a pool of acetone waiting to be dealt with.
Ethanol / Alcohol extractions are also used but are less efficient and seem to take just as much lipids out as well as putting them into an unmanageable gunky state. Ethanol cost much more than Acetone because of the tax and even without the tax, and does not seem to pull as much salvinorin out according to HPLC testing. Not with this method we use anyway. Some people mix acetone and ethanol together hoping for better results.

I have heard of many concerns with using certain non-consumable solvents for extractions that moves me to add this statement.
Remember that a solvent is chosen because of the high evaporation rate. It must evaporate off completely and leave no residue at all. The lower the temerature to evaporate it the better. No exceptions.
During the pouring and drying of the extracts at 175F, the chemicals, what ever they may be, are evaporated with such efficiency that none of the solvent remains to be weighed with the most sensitive scales.
If you have a solvent that boils at 20F then you can safely say that at 80F it will surely rapidly and completely evaporate.

Crude extractions seemed to be manageable for a while. As long as you were only making 5X and 10X. But the wet nature of the fats waxes and oils degraded the quality of the smoke.
As the market grew to desire stronger extracts such as 15X and 20X it became harder and harder to make extractions that were clean and lipid free.

With the higher strengths, more lipids and Salvinorin-A were poured onto fewer leaves to make extracts stronger. This meant very sticky and dirty extracts if crude methods were used. It also meant more cost if you wanted to clean it up. Standardized extracts started looking like the only way to go. There are many roads to standardization.
Crude extracts were not marketable at all in this new stronger form of 20X extract.
As you can see from the picture below this crude extraction is very sticky. And after you pour 50 grams of this onto 50 grams of leaves to make 100 grams of extract it is still not diluted enough with leaves to be tolerable or manageable.

These are the lipids that can be expected from a single kilo extraction. The weight can range as high as 75-100 grams of just lipids alone. Dependant on the quality of the leaves and the solvent and the temperature and time the process is allowed to run.

Enough about Crude methods

A new method had to be developed or adopted that would eliminate the expensive steps of the isolation and standardized methods and at the same time keep the lipids ratio of salvinorin A to a minimum while still providing a strong extraction such as found in a crude extraction methods.
We have developed that method.

OUR METHOD OF EXTRACTION

We do not provide Standardization for extractions nor do we use acetone or ethanol as solvents.
We have eliminated that step and those solvents from the process with the method and equipment we developed and now use.
There is no need to standardize and charge for the process if the process is repeatable. You just do it once and then you eliminate that step. After you have isolated the Salvinorin-A and then weighed and measured it and you find that the end result is the same every time then you can safely eliminate the isolation, weighing and measuring phase. This saves you money and saves you time as well. Even if you are paying for it it is probably not being performed.
Do you taste your tea for strength every time? Of course not, you know what effects a teaspoon will produce.

With our method we know that we will get 99% of the Salvinorin-A out of the leaves and onto the final extract / enhanced leaves. The only thing we need to know is how much salvinorin A is in the leaves to start with. This can be performed with one test and it is performed with each new shipment of leaves from a new supplier. The leaves from any supplier may change as much as a half milligram. But from shipment to shipment from the same supplier they do not change much at all if any. Once a good supply of leaves are found we stick with it.
Up to 3 milligrams of Salvinorin-A can be expected from a top quality supplier. If any more than that is claimed, then it is most likely not a true claim or they are being misled or they are just using more leaves to extract and get that much SA out. You will probably be charged for that.

After years of testing and working with various solvents and equipment we have discovered and developed a method to produce extractions that are void of all lipids but still containst 99% of all the SA.

Notice how clean the above extracton looks compared to crude methods as pictured above this picture. You can also get an idea of the temperature required to accomplish this if you notice the frost that immediately accumulated on the glass after exposing it to the humid air.
99% of all the Salvinorin-A in the leaves was pulled out from the leaves and retained in this 200 gram test using our new method and equipment. More than any other standardized isolation/wash of the same amount of salvia leaves.
Only an HPLC matched these results.
In other words this new method could be used to check for Savlinorin-A quantity as accurately as an HPLC analysis.

This new method of extraction economically and efficiently produces much higher quality and stronger extracts and maintains a totally clean waste free extract, all in one extraction process, with the least loss of salvinorin A - of any other method bar none. We do this with no heat applied to the extraction or leaves. And the entire process take less than 1 hour per 2.5 kilo extraction.
Basically we have discovered how to extract from the leaf material and the lipids in one process.

By using a special formula of solvents along with temperature, pressure and time we can control exactly what and when we will pull out any chemical from just about any material.
We have tested each and every process over the years. The resulting data has been duplicated over and over until we finally began the final deveolpment of our design and extraction equipment. Our final design is now complete and running beautiflly. We call it "The Final Cut"
We borrowed some ideas of the supercritical extractors and incorpoated knowledge and data we gathered over the years to build a totally new extractor.
WE did not cut corners, we eliminated them.
That was our goal for the past two years.
 

Click the picture for full size.
In the picture above you can not help but notice the Salvinorin-A cyrstals adhering to the outside of these flakes of salvia leaf.
This is 20X extract produced with the Final Cut process that we have developed and refined over the past 3 years.
As you can see, the extract is void of all waxes, fats and oils. This is verified by the pure white crystals of Salvinorin-A that crystallized onto the outside of the leaf as the extract cooled down during the drying time.

I think when you receive your extraction order you will no longer be concerned
with standardized extracts and ethanol or acetone extractions.
We have spent the last 3 years designing and building equipment and processes that are specially designed to suit your needs.

BUY SALVIA EXTRACTS

BUY SALVIA LEAF

(Lipids are a large class of organic substances, insoluble in water and greasy to the touch, including the fats, waxes, oils and sterols.)