I have heard over the years of people cleaning up hash oil preparations in various ways, such as winterizing, or even mixing the solvent with activated charcoal. I am curious as to how effective activated charcoal is at cleaning up an extract.

I have heard that if you dissolve some black, gross looking dabs that are heavy in chlorophyll contamination due to using alcohol as a solvent back into some alcohol, add activated charcoal, shake, and filter, that the charcoal will remove the contaminants from the alcohol. The resulting solution is much clearer then it was originally, and upon evap the resulting oil is much lighter and amber colored.

Like I said, I have only heard about this being done. I have also heard of it being done with reclaim in order to clean it up and make it look and taste better. Obviously it won't make it shatter up, due to being decarbed, but if it's cleaner and tastes better that's still a plus. Whenever I search around the Internet though I can't seem to find much info on the subject, and can not find anything showing before and after products. So I come to you, wonderful Nexus community.

Have any of you had experience in using activated charcoal to clean up hash oil?

I cleaned out 3 totally clogged rigs with acetone, and evaporated it in a dish. I am going to scrape all this up and dissolve into alcohol, in order to filter it and get anything unsoluable out. If this charcoal thing really works, at this point id like to try that and see if it makes a lighter, tastier oil. I don't want to do anything that might waste all this useful reclaim though!

i've used it to clarify a SC-CO2/ethanol extract from fresh mint. it does a decent job of capturing large molecules like chlorophyll, proteins, and other macromolecules, while allowing small molecules like menthol and menthone to readily elute. thc is also considered a small molecule.

So it definitely shouldn't harm the potency then?

Also, I have heard reports that if you do this process with isopropyl as the solvent, you end up with a red product instead of amber. This only seems to happen when people use iso. Any idea what that could be about? Probably some type of reaction and byproduct?

probably just some degree of decolorization. iso wont react without some mechanism of strong protonization/deprotonization

Strange. Maybe I will test it out with a small amount of the reclaim. Do half in iso and half in 95% ethanol, note the color difference and any taste or potency difference.

I've used carbon to clean up cannabis extracts. I ground the carbon up fine to increase the surface area and used it with a glass buchner.

Following this I used a 22micron syringe filter. It cleaned the extracts up rather nice, as my extract started off from a light green and ended up as a mostly transparent but slightly golden liquid. After dilution into pg/vg for vape liquid it wad completely colorless.