Croptober is Here! LAUDA is Your Partner for Cannabis Processing Needs
As the harvest season kicks into high gear, cannabis growers across the country are gearing up for Croptober. This time of year marks the critical period when outdoor crops are harvested, leading to an increased demand for storage, processing, and formulation of various cannabis products. From the initial freezing of freshly harvested flowers to the extraction of valuable cannabinoids and terpenes, precise temperature control is essential at every stage of Croptober. In this article, we’ll explore the critical role of temperature regulation throughout the entire process, highlighting the surprising amount of cooling and heating required from early harvest to filling SKUs.
Freezing and Storage: Preserving the Fresh Harvest
One of the earliest and most crucial steps in cannabis processing is freezing freshly harvested plants, a technique commonly associated with “live” products like live resin and live rosin. Freezing immediately after harvest preserves the plant’s full spectrum of terpenes and cannabinoids, maintaining the fresh aromatic and chemical profile that defines each strain. Terpenes are responsible for the plant’s distinctive aroma and flavor, while cannabinoids like THC and CBD contribute to the plant’s therapeutic and psychoactive effects.
Without proper freezing, these volatile compounds can degrade rapidly during traditional drying and curing processes, resulting in a significant loss of flavor, potency, and overall quality. Freezing prevents the evaporation of these compounds and inhibits enzymatic and microbial activity that could otherwise alter the chemical makeup of the plant. The freezing process involves vacuum-sealing plants and storing them at ultra-low temperatures to maintain their integrity. Freezers need to consistently hold these temperatures to ensure the long-term stability of the biomass.
LAUDA-GFL’s Versafreeze freezers, operating between -40 and -86 °C, are designed for this purpose. They provide reliable ultra-low temperature storage, critical for preserving the plant’s quality and preventing the breakdown of its valuable compounds.
LAUDA Versafreeze units also offer remote monitoring via the LAUDA cloud, allowing operators to keep a close watch on freezer conditions and protect against potential thawing. In the event of power loss, additional safety measures, such as gas cylinder and battery backup cooling, ensure temperature stability. Vacuum-insulated walls further enhance performance, providing the fastest recovery times in the industry during outages.
Extraction: Maximizing Cannabinoid and Terpene Yield
After freezing, the next step involves extracting cannabinoids and terpenes. This process relies heavily on maintaining precise, sub-zero temperatures to prevent the inclusion of unwanted compounds such as water and chlorophyll, which can impact the quality and clarity of the extract. While some processers use higher temperatures around -40 °C for extraction, some opt for much lower temperatures at -60 °C or below to ensure that moisture remains frozen, preventing it from dissolving into the extract, which can lead to product degradation and lower cannabinoid and terpene content. Maintaining these cold conditions also helps to exclude chlorophyll and other undesirable plant materials, resulting in a purer, lighter-colored extract.
LAUDA Integral XT units are designed to manage these precise temperature requirements, offering dynamic control from -90 to +320 °C. These units are versatile, providing cooling for solvent tanks, material extraction columns, heat exchangers, and membrane systems, and heating for recovery systems like falling film and wiped film evaporators. The ability to rapidly adjust temperatures ensures that each stage of the extraction process is tightly controlled, reducing thermal stress on the extract and optimizing yield.
These units also support complex extraction setups through advanced monitoring and automation capabilities. Equipped with various communication interfaces—such as ethernet, RS-232/485, analog, Namur contact, D-Sub contact, PROFIBUS, EtherCAT RJ45, and more—these systems seamlessly integrate into automated workflows, allowing processors to fine-tune their operations for consistent, high-quality results. The integration of LAUDA.LIVE technology further enhances these capabilities, providing remote setup assistance, fault diagnosis, and predictive maintenance. This level of control ensures that temperature parameters are maintained precisely, supporting solvent efficiency and product integrity and ultimately enhancing the yield and potency of cannabinoids and terpenes.
Ice Water Extraction: Optimizing Live Rosin Production
Live rosin, a solventless extract, requires a different approach, utilizing ice water extraction instead of hydrocarbons to preserve the purity of cannabinoids and terpenes. In this process, freshly frozen cannabis is submerged in ice-cold water and gently agitated to detach trichomes—the tiny, resin-filled glands where cannabinoids and terpenes are concentrated. During agitation, these globular, ball-on-a-hair-like structures become brittle at low temperatures, causing them to break off from the cannabis flowers and be collected through a series of progressively finer mesh screens.
Traditionally, maintaining low temperatures during this process involved manual ice addition and cold rooms, but fluctuations in temperature could impact trichome separation and lead to inconsistent product quality. To address these challenges, many processors are moving toward using jacketed tanks, which reduce reliance on ice and cold storage, improving control and reducing long-term costs.
LAUDA Ultracool chillers address these challenges by providing precise temperature management for ice-hash extraction, eliminating the need for ice or cold rooms. With a temperature range of -10 to 35 °C and cooling capacities that support up to 25,000 L or more, Ultracool units maintain stable conditions in jacketed tanks or dedicated water systems, ensuring consistent trichome separation. By supplying chilled water directly, these systems prevent the dilution and temperature variations associated with manual ice addition, optimizing the extraction environment.
These chillers feature variable speed fans and compressors which offer significant energy savings over the unit’s lifetime. These units can be installed outside the processing area, minimizing heat exhaust impact on indoor temperatures, reducing strain on HVAC systems, and preserving valuable lab space. The controlled temperature environment provided by LAUDA Ultracool ensures efficient and reliable trichome separation, enhancing the yield and quality of live rosin.
Bulk Processing: From Crude Extracts to Final Products
For those focused on creating bulk cannabis products, processing often begins with crude extracts derived from biomass (crude), which are rich in THCa—the acidic form of THC found in the plant. THCa can be crystallized using hydrocarbon solvents in reactors to produce THCa diamonds, a highly pure crystalline form valued for its potency. These diamonds can be sold as a final product or further refined into highly viscous THC, which does not crystallize and is ideal for use in cartridges, edibles, topicals, and other formulations due to its psychoactive properties.
Crude cannabis extracts typically undergo several key refinement steps, each requiring precise temperature control to achieve the desired quality, purity, and potency. The primary stages include winterization, decarboxylation, and distillation, all of which are temperature-sensitive and must be carefully managed to optimize the final product.
LAUDA’s temperature control units can be used in every stage of bulk processing. Our range of equipment—including hot-water baths, table shakers, hot oil circulators, and chillers—supports critical applications such as wiped film and falling film evaporators, rotary evaporators, membrane systems, decarboxylation reactors, and winterization processes.
LAUDA is your partner in cannabis processing
Temperature control is essential at every stage of cannabis processing, from initial freezing to final formulation. LAUDA provides comprehensive solutions tailored to the specific needs of cannabis processors, supported by expert engineers who can help configure the ideal system for your operation. Whether you’re building a new lab or optimizing an existing setup, many processors are unaware that chillers and other temperature control equipment can often be swapped between brands, even at the quoting stage. Consulting with LAUDA ensures you’re equipped with the best technology to meet your Croptober demands, helping you select the right system to keep your operation on track for harvest season.
This post was authored by Christopher Sebastiano, Southeast Sales Manager at LAUDA-Brinkmann.