Today I’m gonna be showing you how I made some edible THC sugar. This was just an experiment I was doing to test out my new vacuum pump as I was excited to finally have one and be able to use a vacuum chamber. I don’t recommend you follow this as a how-to as this is just an experiment I did, and I did make some errors. I’m excited to show you the process. So, let’s get started,

 

#1 Step One: 

 

The first thing I did was that I took some plain sugar purchased from Amazon and measured one cup of it into a measuring container. Then I took 190 proof clear spring grain alcohol that I purchased when I went on a trip to America and measured one cup of that into a measuring container. Then placed a beaker onto a hot plate and measured out about 60 ml of the ethanol and dropped in a magnetic stir bar as well as poured in one gram of distillate. This gram of distillate contains about 900 milligrams of THC. 

 

Hence, I turned on the magnetic hotplate stirrer which started stirring the magnetic stir bar on its minimum heat setting which helped to dissolve the THC into the ethanol. This process took about 30 seconds to fully dissolve. 

 

Note: During this process, if your distillate does not fully dissolve or there is cloudiness then you know that your distillate has been cut with something and is impure. Do not use that for smoking.

 

# Step Two:

 

I turned on the strong stirring to scrape the remainder from the edges of the beaker as those can be more a lot more stubborn and stuck to the sides. After fully dissolving into the ethanol I poured the dissolved portion back into the measuring container and it instantly fully mixed. Then I added one cup of organic cane sugar to the solution. Ethanol is sufficiently polar to dissolve some glucose. In water it is hydrogen bonding which provides the polarity while in ethanol van der Waals forces provide the polarity which are weaker. 

 

In molecular physics the van der Waals force named after dutch scientist johannes Derek van der Waals is a distant dependent interaction between atoms or molecules. This means is that the electrons around an atom are always revolving around the atom. When these electrons happen to be on the same side of the atom this part of the atom becomes slightly negative and the other part becomes slightly positive. When this happens on atoms near each other, a brief attraction occurs between the slightly negative side called a dipole. It happens on one atom and the slightly positive dipole on the other atom.

 

It is not a strong interaction but when a shit-ton of atoms simultaneously line up and this happens it is something worth considering. I noticed that the sugar was not dissolving very well into the ethanol so I decided to add another cup of ethanol hoping that that would help the sugar fully dissolve. 

 

# Step Three:

 

After the above steps, I attached a rubber stopper to the top of the beaker and attached vacuum hosing and pulled a vacuum. This caused the solution to start to boil. I was hoping that this would help the sugar dissolve into the ethanol more but it did not really assist in the process. The reason could be, I fully saturated the ethanol and have a large amount of sugar left over. But, I just want to have the THC evenly distributed across the sugar and this should be sufficient for that.

 

Then I removed the vacuum and boiled the solution normally to help reduce the ethanol. I love the solution to boil for about half an hour which reduced the majority of the alcohol from the solution. At this phase, I did notice that the sugar was now beginning to more fully dissolve into the ethanol. 

 

So it seems heat helped a lot. I also believe that 5 percent of water content was aiding strongly in this. I beg I removed the magnetic stirrer as I was ready to reduce the rest of the solution I didn’t want it to get in the way. At this point, I was also happy to see that the solution had fully dissolved the sugar. The reason is still unknown. Maybe this is from the heat or the higher water content as the ethanol boiled off. But either way, this was a good sign as it showed me that the THC was evenly distributed across the solution.

 

# Step Four:

 

At this phase, I attached a stopper and a vacuum hose and proceeded to purge the liquid from the solution. The thought I had that once fully purged the sugar would be brittle enough that I’d be able to scratch it from the bottom of the flask. However, once it crystallized, it was very hard and I was not able to remove it from the beaker. 

 

So after scratching at it for a bit to test I decided to pour in half a cup of water to dissolve the sugar so that it could be removed. Then I would vacuum purge the sugar from the solution. I applied a light heat for about 10 minutes to allow the sugar to dissolve then poured it into some parchment paper that I placed into the vacuum chamber to allow it to boil again. The idea was here that I would pour it into the parchment paper and the parchment paper would be easier to break the sugar apart off of.

 

So, I actually put it into the vacuum chamber to heat it so that I wouldn’t have to move the solution in between units. However, the heat transfer rate through the parchment paper was very low and after several hours with the low heat, I was only able to dissolve a very small amount of the water. So I decided to pick up the parcel and carefully place it into a glass bowl and place that into my toaster oven. 

 

# Step Six:

 

This time, I set the toaster oven at about 95 degrees Celsius to prevent it from getting fully boiled. I set it to bake and with the timer on for the full half an hour. In total, I baked it for around two hours and after that when I took it out of the toaster it had a layer of crystallization on top. Then I carefully transferred the parchment into my vacuum chamber.

 

Sugar bonds very strongly to water so we’re going to need to use a vacuum chamber to purge the final portion of water from our solution. Otherwise, wheels would be left with simple syrup if we keep trying to bake it. 

 

So here I put it into the vacuum chamber and it immediately started to boil away the water from the solution. At this point, it was just run under a vacuum as I did not apply any heat. This simple syrup was starting to look pretty tasty on its own so I decided to take it off the vacuum and store some in a jar for later.

 

# Step Seven:

 

This was actually looking pretty tasty and I then put it back on to the vacuum to reduce the final amount of water from the solution. But at the same time, it was looking pretty dry, therefore I decided to open it up and take a look. There was a little thin layer of moisture on the top and probably a lot of water trapped underneath. I put it back on the hot plate and then heat the solution internally to about 40 degrees Celsius which helped to boil off the last portion of the water. And it worked a lot better.

 

Then I removed it from the vacuum and gently scratched it with a fork. To aid the vacuum in removing the final portion of moisture after scratching out, I gently placed it back onto the hot plate to purge the final amount of liquid from the solution as the glass is fogging up. We know that there is water being pulled from the sugar and it didn’t look like the sugar is becoming any drier. 

 

However, it did seem quite dry now so I went and pulled it out of the vacuum chamber. Then gathered all of the sugar onto a piece of parchment paper so that I could break it into smaller granules. To break it up I just pressed it with a fork. But it was still too moist for my liking. I would have to give it one last round in the vacuum to remove the last portion of water. I placed a fresh piece of parchment paper into the vacuum container and poured the sugar into the vacuum chamber. Here the 2 hours are hyper lapsed into about 4 seconds and you still can’t see any change. But it sucked out a lot of the moisture

 

At this point, it was just about a solid puck of sugar and it was not stuck to the parchment in any way and remained one solid piece. I slid the puck of sugar onto a fresh piece of parchment paper and proceeded to break it up by hand.

 

Conclusion

 

In the end, it looks like the sugar has yellowed quite a bit. This is likely a result of too much heat causing a small amount of caramelization as well as some color from the distillate. Once broken up into small enough pieces by hand I placed them into a mortar and pestle to grind them into granules again. I placed it into a ziplock bag for later use. This is how we make edible THC sugar. 

 

This was my experiment, I know there are some mistakes that could have been avoided but anyway it turned out amazing. If you have found it useful, please let us know.