Ethanol Extract - Full Strong Buzz & Moderate flavor

DVap;11766972 said:

The 0.5 grams per 100 grams was an early effort. Depending on the tobacco, I can get several times that amount of purified alkaloids.

3.5 grams from 110 grams of tobacco gives me enough information to get my head around this.

The amount of available alkaloids from the typical RYO tobacco is around 1.2%. Getting those 1.2% alkaloids isn't easy and steps must be taken to assure thorough cell disruption. I'd guess about 25% alkaloid recovery using cold ethanol. This means that 110 grams of tobacco would yield 0.33 grams of alkaloids. The harder you work to improve the alkaloid recovery, the more crud is going to be co-extracted.

Ethanol is going to pull out a lot of crud, even ice cold. Purified tobacco alkaloids are not semi-solid or even viscous, they are a free flowing liquid. If we take the 3.5 gram figure and combine it with 0.33 grams of alkaloids, then the alkaloid percentage in the semi-solid can be gotten from 0.33/3.5 or around 10%. WTA is a purified alkaloid isolate, so a material that is only 10% pure should not be referred to as WTA.

If I understand the dilution correctly, the semi-solid was diluted to 2.4% of it's initial strength. This is equivalent to diluting 1 gram of the semi-solid to around 40 mL or all 3.5 grams to 140 mL. Since the 3.5 grams of semi-solid likely contains around 330 mg of alkaloids, and the final volume for vaping is 140 mL. This gives us 330 mg / 140 mL or around 2.4 mg/mL of tobacco alkaloids.

2.4 mg/mL strikes me as a pretty good alkaloid content for a NET type extraction. The use of cold ethanol might well provide an advantage over more aggressive extractions.

Getting a highly efficient alkaloid extraction unfortunately requires aggressive conditions. Sort of a "twice the alkaloids equals twice the crud" situation.

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