CBD oil extracted from cannabis plants is quite famous among people who are on the lookout for herbal therapeutic and personal care products. High-quality CBD oils made of pure hemp extract maintain a minimalistic ingredient profile to check the influx of ingredients from dampening their potency. Most of the CBD oils have CBD extract and carrier oil as their ingredients.
How Is CBD Oil Manufactured?
The manufacture of CBD oil progresses through multiple steps including extraction and purification. Let us discuss each of the steps in detail.
Extraction
It refers to the act of pulling out essential compounds from hemp, using suitable extracting agents. Some of the CBD extraction methods include:
- CO2 extraction: Supercritical, subcritical and mid-critical extractions are the three types of CO2 Supercritical extraction uses CO2 in the supercritical stage (between liquid and gas). It is the most commonly used CO2 extraction method.
- Ethanol extraction: It uses ethanol/grain alcohol as the extracting solvent. The associated cost of ethanol extraction is lower than that of CO2
- Other extraction methods: Butane extraction, hexane extraction, propane extraction are some of the other extraction methods. Because the solvents in these processes are toxic in nature, they should not be left out even in traces in the final product.
Purification
The CBD oil extracted from hemp is termed crude CBD oil and needs to be purified. Crude CBD oil is purified by performing distillation that involves two steps; winterization and short path distillation. This purification procedure is characteristic of supercritical CO2 extraction.
Winterization
Supercritical CO2 extraction involves high pressure/high temperature due to which almost all compounds are pulled out from the plant, which includes the compounds that you do not want in the final product. In the process, the crude CBD oil is mixed with alcohol and kept overnight in a freezer. The mixture turns cloudy by morning and the fats and waxes in it can be easily filtered out by passing through a filter paper.
After the fats and waxes are removed, the alcohol used in the step is removed by warming the mixture to the boiling point of alcohol, which is lower than that of CBD oil.
Short Path Distillation
The step is performed to further refine the CBD oil extract and isolate the individual cannabinoids. In this step, the extracted oil is heated to separate the individual compounds based on their boiling points.
Strict quality control of the manufacturing processes guarantees a high purity level of the final product.