I’ve acquired whole dried organic tobacco leaves and am curious if anyone might know the importance of deveining your tobacco for extraction in Everclear?
Also, I am curious if anyone might have experience curing their tobacco to make cavendish?
It is not important to devein the leaves but you do want them well cured and crushed up for more surface area. I would cut off the stem if it has one though.
You can do all sorts of things with your loose leaf tobacco to add flavoring just like regular pipe mfgs do. I've experimented with adding flavors to the leaves and a bit of smoking (with a smoking gun) similar to adjuncts with beer I guess you could say. I haven't gotten as far as flue curing my own tobacco or anything yet.
Have you tried microwave-curing? (As background - one of the tobacco company researchers tried it back in the 60s or 70s, I think, and found it resulted in reduced levels of certain toxins, with no offsetting increase. Tried to convince the company to switch and market their products as safer. Was shot down due to the idea giving the impression their previous product wasn't safe. But he'd done a lot of testing first, and had decent success with the curing. And I think it was even a cheaper process than the old one the company stuck with...)
Thoughts on grain alcohol vs wood alcohol extraction? & do you follow up with secondary extraction (pv cold or hot)?
Typically you extract with either PG or ethanol either hot or cold maceration for X amount of time. From there you can filter immediately or you can let it steep. From there you can filter and then steep some more. There are endless possibilities here. I would recommend looking around here: https://www.e-cigarette-forum.com/forums/liquid-extraction-from-tobacco.489/
There is also steam distillation and a couple other methods but those are the main 4 (hot or cold maceration of ethanol based or PG based solution)