It's possible to extract cannabis with a coffee machine

Since liquid coffee is extracted from coffee beans or ground coffee, it seems possible to’extract a cannabinoid concentrate using cannabis flowers in the same way. At least, that’s what a team of scientists discovered when they put a cannabis bud in a Nespresso machine. This experiment is set to be published soon in the International Journal of Pure and Applied Chemistry.

The process in question

The researchers have used cannabis provided by the Pharmaceutical Inspection and Drug Control Unit of the Valencia Health District in Spain. They inserted it into the filter after thoroughly cleaning it to extract THC, CBD, and CBN from the flower.

Making coffee with an espresso machine seems really easy at first glance. All you have to do is press a button, insert a capsule, and—voilà—you have coffee. But in reality, a lot is going on inside the machine. The button in question activates an electric motor that sends a pulse to the water pump, causing it to draw water from the reservoir and direct it to the flow meter, which calculates the optimal volume of water for the coffee dose. The water is then redirected to another pump, which sends it to the boiler—equipped with a sensor—where it is heated to a temperature between 93° and 110° C. Next, the heated water enters the compression chamber where the capsule is located. This initiates a high-pressure brewing process—at least 9 bars—during which the water extracts the aromas and flavor from the ground coffee; once combined with the water, this creates the coffee we drink.

This process is known as percolation or leaching and refers to the passage of a substance through an absorbent material such as water, or to techniques for extracting soluble compounds using a solvent—in this case, 2-propanol (also known as isopropyl alcohol). What sets the espresso machine apart is the very high pressure in the compression chamber, which allows the plant’s active compounds to be extracted and transferred into the liquid phase. The result: a «water» concentrated in cannabinoids (the extraction here does not take the same form as the concentrates consumers are accustomed to).

A cost-effective solution

This method has the advantage of being very cost-effective—both financially, since you can now legitimately do without high-end equipment that costs around €1,500, and in terms of saving time and effort. This is especially true since the process does not damage the machine, provided it is thoroughly cleaned. These are advantages that scientists have highlighted: «The use of capsule espresso machines has recently been proposed for analytical extractions due to their ease of use, speed, availability, and low cost; they provide efficient extractions of solid organic compounds in a matter of seconds.».

In particular, this type of machine produces the same results as traditional extraction techniques, while being faster and requiring no supervision. The results were compared with those from extraction techniques traditional fields in the world of chemistry such as ultrasound technology, gas chromatography and mass spectrometry, or ion mobility spectrometry. The techniques traditionally used in cannabis extraction, whether with or solvent-free, were all time-consuming and costly compared to this process. Since this method has proven effective for products other than coffee—notably cannabis—it could be used more frequently in chemistry as a rapid, automated extraction process.