Hi! Why you dont want to try methanol? In this research
Article Development and validation of a liquid chromatographic metho...
we compare water extraction with 3 methods that included methanol, and found that the water protocol gave fewer yield of sugars... maybe you can check what we discussed about it.
oh yes! i remember that because we also use that same column you will use. For methanol removal we rotoevaporated the samples, therefore is it possible to use methanol just in the extraction process, remove it though rotoevaporation and then prepare the samples for HPLC. For more details you can check the publication...