Updated 3/5/2022

One of the first things everyone has to do to create usable cannabinoids is to decarboxylate. In this scenario we are decarbing Cannabigerol acid (CBGA) into Cannabigerol (CBG). We do this to “activate” the cannabinoid.

If you just want the numbers, below is a chart that summarizes our results. Feel free to stop here, or read more below for our thoughts and caveats.

TL;DR: The best combination is low and slow. 60 minutes @ 215F seems to produce a great activated CBG.

We are assuming you are here because you have some CBGA plant material or derivative and want to decarboxylate the material to make it active in your own formulations, such as edibles, tinctures, etc. There really aren’t many sources for this information publicly available, so we figured we might as well be the first to publish our findings based on real lab tests.

Caveat: This is a sample size of 1, but it is a real-world data-point. Our approach and write-up is a simplistic / non-scientist description of a process, in which a hobbyist could use to decarb their own CBGA. If you choose to take on this challenge and do your own lab tests, we encourage you to share your results!

Time and Temperature

As many of you may already know, the most common way of decarbing cannabis uses a balance of time and temperature. The home oven method is a simple and effective decarb process. However, CBGA has a much lower boiling point than its more well known, and well studied, relatives THCA and CBDA.

We worked hard getting high levels of CBGA in our plants, we don’t want to destroy it by using aggressive heat!

According to a few sources around the Internet, the decarboxylating point for THCA is 105° C / 221° F and CBDA is 120° C / 248° F. A typical process for decarbing these cannabinoids will be to put your plant material in the oven for 20 - 60 minutes at 220° F - 260° F. The higher the temperature the shorter time in the oven. However, the higher the temperature the quicker the process, which means you better have everything dialed-in correctly or you risk overcooking it. In the case of THCA, notice that it has a lower decarb point. When decarbing CBDA above 220°F you will decarb your THCA into THC, but with continued heat and time, you risk converting your THC into CBN, which may be acceptable, but isn’t always what people want.

Pre-heating oven

Pre-heating your oven and having a good temperature gauge is crucial to not overdoing it. But, beyond pre-heating your oven, there is a bit of a delay upfront since your cooking vessel and material needs to be heated to that temperature. Based on our method of using a mason jar to minimize odor, it will take 10-15 minutes for this the jar and material to heat up. This number is built into our numbers below.

The Winner: Based on our tests we found that 101° C / 215° F for 60 minutes worked the best.

Test results

Starting material: 8% CBGA biomass (dried), total available CBG 7% (based on 87.7% weight retention on losing the carboxyl group)

CBGA Decarb - 20 Minutes @ 215°F

In our short 20 minute run, you can see we’re just getting started. Only about 1% of the 7% total material has been converted.

CBGA Decarb - 40 Minutes @ 215°F

On our next stop at 40 minutes you can see that we’re cooking now. The tables have turned and we have successfully decarb a total of 5.34% of our 7% available.

CBGA Decarb - 60 Minutes @ 215°F

We could have stopped at 40 minutes, but we figured it was worth trying to convert more. After 60 minutes, the majority of the CBGA has been decarbed to CBG. Of the 7% available, we’ve been able to capture 6.2%.

Conclusion

In conclusion, there is still a half a percent left of CBGA at 60 minutes, which means we may want to try to capture that in future tests. There is a small risk of destroying some, but it will be interesting to see how far we can push it!

We hope this has been useful. Please share any feedback or other data-points.