Inside the Terp Church: A Look at Our Extraction Lab

Welcome to the Terp Church

Our extraction lab in Arcata isn’t just a room with equipment. It’s where flower becomes oil, and where every decision we make shows up in the final product. Our team calls it the Terp Church, and for good reason.

We built this lab from the ground up. Not a turnkey setup, not a rented space with someone else’s equipment. Every piece of gear was chosen, tested, and configured to do one thing: preserve the terpene profile of Humboldt County flower.

The Extractor

At the center of the operation is a custom Open Source Steel BHO extractor, the newest evolution of a design we collaborated on with OSS. It features 48-inch columns, an oversized collection pot, two 24-inch molecular sieves, and two Master Vapor pumps. This thing is a beast, but it’s also precise and user-friendly.

During extraction, the slurry of cannabinoids, terpenes, esters, and flavonoids travels through multiple 1-micron stainless steel filter plates. That filtration is what gives our oil its clarity and ensures clean function in the cartridge hardware: no clogs, no char, every drop usable.

Cryogenic Storage

All of our input material, whether it’s fresh-frozen nugget for live resin or cured sugar leaf trim, is stored in -100° cryogenic freezers. This preserves quality from the moment flower arrives at the lab until it’s ready for extraction.

The process: fresh material gets packed into 200-micron filter bags, held in -20°C freezers initially, then moved to the -100° deep freeze for at least 24 hours before extraction. The cold chain is never broken.

The Huber 815 Unistat

Our chiller is the Huber 815 Unistat, what Nick calls the GT40 of cryogenic extraction chilling. It’s a 730-pound, $60,000 piece of German engineering that feeds our extraction system with precisely controlled temperatures. We run cured resin extraction at -100°, which ensures we’re pulling only the non-polar molecules we want (the terpenes, the cannabinoids) while leaving behind water-soluble compounds we don’t.

It’s top-heavy and expensive, so yes, we earthquake-strapped it to the floor. This is California.

Why It Matters

You can’t make craft resin without craft infrastructure. The equipment, the cold chain, the filtration. These aren’t marketing decisions. They’re engineering decisions that directly affect what ends up in your cartridge.

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