Fresh flower tops vs dried plant material
Hemp extraction is the process of removing the important components from hemp and concentrating them into usable extracts. The flower tops contain the highest concentrations of cannabinoids and other desirable substances such as terpenes and flavonoids.
Dutch Cannabis Processing is the only CBD producer in the world that uses Fresh Flower tops to produce CBD oil. Once the plants have been harvested, they enter our patented process the same day! Only olive oil is used in our process and no other solvents such as ethanol or butane.
There are several other methods used for hemp extraction. Extractors using CO2 often claim that their extraction method is superior to ethanol extraction, and some go as far as to say their CO2 extraction method is “solventless”. But every CO2 extraction method uses ethanol or a similar solvent.
To remove the cannabinoids, terpenes and flavonoids from the flower tops, a solvent must be used. This solvent dissolves the components into an extract.
This process is more complicated than it seems. Extracting hemp involves a variety of steps, materials, tools, and skills that only a qualified extractor can provide. Even if you have everything in order, it is still possible to make serious mistakes during hemp extraction.
These risks do not occur in the DCP process as the components are extracted from the hemp plant using olive oil.
- Ethanol extraction ⟹ dried plant material and use of ethanol
- CO2 extraction ⟹ dried plant material and use of ethanol
- Hydrocarbon extraction ⟹ dried plant material and use of butane or propane
For these 3 types of processes only dried plant material can be used. Due to this process important components (mainly terpenes) are lost. Terpenes are the volatile aromatic components that give each plant species its own distinctive smell and taste. The smell of fresh plants is many times stronger than that of dried plants. Just compare fresh and dried herbs with each other.
The reason for our own patented process and the use of fresh flower tops is that we want to preserve as much of the natural components from the flower tops as possible to achieve a full spectrum CBD oil.
