Botanical Extractions | Temperature Matters

A large number of the phone calls that come into our main office number (1-844-446-4262) are customers in search of the sweet spot for processing their plant material. Many times they ask one simple question – “what pressure should I set the extraction vessel for ABC plant?” The potential risk of this question is that the ability of a botanical solute to dissolve into a solvent is generally heavily dependent on Temperature more so than pressure.

Impacted by Temperature

To illustrate this, I took two raspberry green tea bags, placed them plastic cups and filled them directly with hot and room temperature water from our water cooler. The video is time lapse (thanks to Apple’s new IOS8) and in real time took just over 1 minute. Another interesting fact is that surface tension is also impacted by temperature. So the higher temperature water is able to more quickly penetrate the tea bag. This is analogous to the ability of the solvent to penetrate the cellular matrix of your plant.