Before getting the CDB oil for your production, there is some prior work you need to do. This includes cultivating and harvesting the cannabis plant, and then extracting the oil from it. You can extract CBD from two cannabis plants – hemp and marijuana. Hemp contains 0.3% or less of THC (tetrahydro cannabidiol), which is a psychoactive. The hemp plant also contains more CBD compared to the marijuana one. Marijuana, in its turn, has over 0.3% of THC.

While usually mistaken, CBD oil and hemp oil are different. You find and extract CBD oil from hemp flowers and leaves, while hemp comes from the crushing of hemp seeds.

Ethanol and CO2 are usually the safest solvents you can use in the CBD oil extraction process. In the ethanol process, you need to cool it down to -40 °C or even less to avoid solving undesired compounds with the oil. Then you must soak the plant in the ethanol to split the extract and the biomass. Next, ethanol evaporates in a different vessel, separating from the material. A “warm” ethanol process also works, but then requires winterization, which then removes the unwanted compounds that stayed during extraction. Cold ethanol increases process efficiency.