CBD Piggy has rediscovered an amazing way to reconnect with nature and nutrition using a new way of creating hemp extract! While many other manufacturers rely on oils that end up highly refined, CBD Piggy goes for the black gold known as spagyric extract. This heavy, thick, tarlike substance contains almost all of the hemp plant’s natural constituents, most of which are eliminated in our competitors’ products. Beyond just the cannabinoids, you will find plant flavonoids, proteins, fats, sugars, chlorophyll, vitamins and minerals, all of which provide much more of the hemp plant’s original content at a much higher concentration.
Products that are prepared using a spagyric process are a deceptively new thing. The name comes from a process developed long ago by doctors from the medieval times like Paracelsus, who advocated creating concentrations of medicinal plants. This meant taking what was then believed to be the most effective parts of natural products and using them to aid in various treatments, but also maintaining as close a form of the product to the form of the natural source.
The spagyric process depends on keeping the distillation process confined to removing as little as possible from the plant besides the solvents used, like ethanol. The whole point of using ethanol is to extract not merely the oils, but also all the other potentially water-soluble parts. This hypothesis comes from the fact that ethanol and water can mix together, thus salts may combine and recombine with other products from the extraction and be more bioavailable.
After the freshly harvested plant material is air-dried, it is soaked in ethanol for a set period of time, usually several days to a week. The extract is then filtered and put into a vacuum chamber and the ethanol is evaporated and recovered. The process is then repeated until the biomass is exhausted. Then the biomass is burned in a special furnace and burned down until the white ash is recovered.
The biomass is then placed into distilled water until all the water soluble minerals are dissolved. The liquid is then poured off and evaporated; the leftover minerals are then recombined into the extract. The recombination of the hydrated salts and the extract gives the raw product its full body and effects; there are even potential reactions observed as the minerals mix in with the extracted oils.
Our tinctures follow this form by keeping the minerals from the plant matter. Our customers report that our spagyric tinctures, the Super Drops and Acid Drops line, give a stronger effect for a given dose concentration than CBD distillate. While customer experiences are subjective, running tests on instruments will show you a stronger argument for spagyrics, shown below.
We even received permission to reproduce a gas chromatography test report from Evolved Alchemy to demonstrate the differences in respective relative abundance of the cannabinoids. The higher voltage spikes in the graph of the spagyric test show the superiority of using the spagyric process compared to simple ethanol extraction.
Spagyrics contain more than just the cannabinoids and their acid forms. They contain as much of the terpenes, flavonoids, chlorophyll and plant proteins as ethanol can possibly wash from the plant. The minerals’ interaction with the ethanol extract seem to raise it’s reading for relative abundance compared to the simple ethanol hemp extract. This amazing result is what demonstrates the efficacy of these particular tinctures when our customers take them.
Instead of having a refined extract that looks like a clear liquid, spagyric extract looks like a very heavy tar that flows very slowly and clumps together. This raw extract is then thinned with our carrier oils like flax and algae oil in order to create a tincture that flows much more easily than the raw extract itself. Also, scientific research demonstrates that the hemp plant produces cannabinoids using the same pathway which produce the omega-3 fatty acids; we add these two components together to form a much more beneficial product that gives the utility of both sides of hemp’s internal processes.
Our choice in using spagyric extracts in our product stems from our own investigations of the entourage effect. This is a phenomenon where multiple different types of the plant’s chemical constituents are mixed together and taken, which provides a stronger effect for the person taking the product. We have the idea that if we can add as much as we can of the active ingredients of the plant, beyond merely just the cannabinoids, but also things like the flavonoids and the nutrients themselves, then the entourage effect will be stronger. As the entourage effect does not lend itself easily to systematic tests, this means that people will have to be careful while taking this, knowing that each person’s reaction will be different. To the best of our knowledge, we have formulated our products to fight complicated aches and pains and inflammation, but we are not limiting the efficacy of our product to just that.