Yeah, sublingual extract dosing is exactly what I'm after!
Not bad ideas here. I guess my first question is, are alcohol extracts safe? I had always heard they might have been the cause of liver disease and etc.
The idea of just completely saturating coconut oil is really interesting, I'll have to think about that.
Do you think that making an extract from an instant as a starting point would be easier than starting with med grind or micro?
Small amounts of alcohol are safe to ingest. You would dry it out to get practically all the alcohol out, though. Alcohol is a potent solvent for the compounds in kava. It will extract everything that is in there; it will not select kavalactones (good) at the expense of flavokavains (possibly bad).
However, when you drink micronized or instant, you are also drinking everything in the root except the hard fibrous makas. Most people say traditional extraction is "safer" than alcohol extraction. I have read some papers purporting to show that; nonetheless, I am not convinced it is true. That's my opinion, but you should know that it is a heterodox opinion.
This brings up an interesting question: is coconut oil extraction "safer" (in the sense of extracting less FKB than alcohol extraction)?
I have absolutely no idea. It could be "safer", or it could be "less safe". The scientific studies that would answer that question have not been done, that I know of.
But really, in my opinion, the most important way to ensure safety is to have good root to begin with: noble, no bark aerial plant parts. In other words, root from any of the vendors here that has been tested as noble.
If you are making extract, you should use medium grind. The goal with extraction is to
separate the chemicals of interest from the rest of the plant material. If you have an extremely finely ground micronized or instant, it will not be possible to do that, because the fine particles will pass through your filter. You could make extract with instant if you had a centrifuge, but that would be a very expensive way to make extract. There is no advantage to making extract from micro or instant.
