When it come to butane hash oil, experts agree that laboratory grade n-butane is the cleanest, most effective solvent for extracting concentrates from cannabis. Historically, this gas has only been available in bulk cylinders from specialty gas suppliers or in portable cans from overseas. But now there’s a new American-made n-butane designed specifically for the needs of BHO makers — Puretane.
The man behind this new solvent is Adam Hopkins — an entrepreneur who sells synthetic urine, grinders and vaporizers to headshops around the country. Hopkins says that, like most great ideas, he thought of it while getting high.
“I talk to a lot of headshop owners around the country, and I noticed how huge butane was getting,” Hopkins says. “Our retailers couldn’t get enough of it … but most of the supply chain comes from South Korea and gets locked up at the port for months waiting for inspection.”
So Hopkins began sourcing Gulf Coast oil and manufacturing his own butane from a refinery in Long Beach — earning him the nickname the “butane cowboy.”
“Most of our oil comes from the Gulf of Mexico and gets refined right in the Gulfport / Shreveport area. No problem with customs, no boat from China.”
Several Asian and European brands that have been popularly adopted by extract artists claim that they’re three, five, or seven-time refined, but those filtrations are not subject to our nation’s rigorous controls.
“No other country in the world has environmental regulations as tight as America,” Hopkins explains. “Here, you know that the filling room was clean, free of particles, and that the lines were cleaned between batches.”
The only other American-made butane company is Ronson, but their gas is full of mercaptans — organic sulfur compounds added to give the product a distinctly noxious odor. Use of this type of butane for extractions is widely known to result in dirty BHO (known in some circles as “Black Poison” or “Tane Soup”) that can seriously harm a person if ingested.
Puretane, on the other hand, is made with maximum purity in mind, specifically for extracting oils out of marijuana. They utilize fractional distillation — an organic process that uses heat to separate chemical compounds and filter out impurities. The end product is 99.9998% pure, containing only one ten- thousandth of a percent of sulfur — which they consider medical grade (as evidenced by the green cross on the can).
“I’m no sommelier of wax,” he admits, “but we’ve been real happy with the clean taste of the BHO it produces. All I care about is passing along the purest possible product to our customers.”
Eventually, Hopkins hopes that his product and other American-made butanes will take over the market. “There’s a lot of entrepreneurs, creativity, and experimentation out there,” he says. “The weed industry is like the wild west.”
Yippie Ki-yay, butane cowboy.
