Is a defatting step necessary prior to freeze precipitating crystals with good purity if you are going to reuse the solvent? Or, in other words, if you were going to reuse solvent from the freeze precipitation step for a second (or third etc,) freeze, would it lower the quality of your crystals?

I assume if you didn't have a defat step, some of the fats and nasty stuff would carry over into your solvent over multiple pulls, and would give you a slightly lower quality product. Right?

If you have added your solvent to your basified mix, do not try and defat it. If you are extracting from MHRB you should not need to defat, at all. Just pull the spice with your solvent and freeze precip.
IH