Hey guys, this is gonna be my first time doing an extraction. I plan right now to use the A/B Lextek tek for this using vinegar, sodium hydroxide, and VM&P naptha. I have a pound of mimosa hostilis R/B. I have scaled it down to what i would need to extract 100 g of the mimosa which has come out to:
100g Mimosa Hostilis
12.5g Sodium Hydroxide
50ml White Vinegar
100ml Solvent VM&P Naptha
600ml Distilled Water
I have a seperatory funnel, litmus papers, a thermometer, (lots of glass lab-ware), 30g of sodium hydroxide, white vinegar, a gallon of distilled water, 450g of mimosa, and i also have some 30% hydrochloric that's 12 molar that i don't know if i will use. I plan on doing 100 g for the first extraction.
This is my first time extracting , I have experienced spice on several different occasion but i want to do this myself. If any of you guys could give me any tips on what tek i should use, which solvents work best, how long to do the acid washes, ect...

Sounds like you got things figured out.

If I could give two tips, it is, first, to go more overboard with the first acidic washes/boils, do like 5 of them or at least 4, maybe even freeze-thaw (in particular if your material isnt finely powdered), with the last one of them letting stand for at least a day before boiling. This, because even if the last boils probably wont have many alkaloids, this is the first step which will limit everything else after it. So I think better to make sure you got all the alks at first. You could for the sake of science extract the last acid boil/wash separately, to see if theres anything significant and let us know. But since this is your first extraction, I also understand if you dont want all that work

The other tip I have is just to not throw anything away till youre finished and have your final yield. If something goes wrong, you can always go back and recover things, find what happened and fix it.

Happy extractions!

Thank you endlessness, another question. Would you recommend hydrochloric or vinegar for the acid washes?

Like I told you on my first extraction I did three simmers with finely powdered bark. I did two of them for a couple hours each, decanting each one, and the third one I used a LOT of water with vinegar and simmered the bark for about 6 hours while I slept. The first two simmers decanted in the refrigerator overnight during the last acid simmer.

After that I decanted, filtered, decanted, filtered, and reduced the acid tea down to 400 ml. I decanted again and ended up with an incredibly deep purple 'wine' that was quite sparkling and clear of particulates. I think the hardest part is the filtering, and perhaps I went overboard. However later on I had almost no emulsions in the separatory funnel. On a subsequent extraction I cut down on the simmer time to about 45 minutes each simmer and had little yield loss from the same batch of bark.