ok, so swm did a normal STB, pulled with 2% citric acid solution. After evaporation and drying the first pull came out like some goo or oil, the others dried and formed some purple crystals...looks fine to me. What went wrong with the first one? What is it, and can it be washed?

purple crystals? Where's that citric acid from, is it food safe, is it pure?

what solvent did you use to pull from the cact?

from the brewing store, so I assume food-grade. This was the first pull with xylene which was distinctively yellow in color, compare to the following two, which were green. Crystals are almost sugar like. he's have never seen a water substance turn to sticky oil goo !? To be safe I suppose Swim should just wash it all. Acetone?
Also, he checked PH but the water never turned acidic as described in this one trout tek!?
Does that mean there is more in there?
Wondering if he should do the next one with Vinegar. He's never tried citric acid b4...
Thank you!

WOOP WOOP Purple crystal alert!


really tho ... Don't smoke that.

nope, acetone washing gooey citric slats wont help any. i'd add it back in the mix and re-extract. if the pulls are still green, there are more to come.
add more base if your pulls are still pulling green out

if you want to avoid goo, and have easier titration i'd recomend hcl, or other salt form. your tummy is full of hcl, how is a tiny bit of impure hcl supposed to be bad for ya?? i dont get the whole "food safe" acid... its not like you eat mescaline daily or anything... plus other salts are easier to work with and purify. refrence: all the reports of brown goo here at Nex...

good luck

swim was trying something new..there you have it
Re-dissolve in basic solution or Naptha?
No sep funnel handy, Swim's been using the freezer to separate layers, is that a problem? I don't see why.
Is vinegar such a pain also?

oh, citric has been tried many times, with mixed results. its great to experiment and try out new methods though, and i'm waiting for my friend to perfect his citric salting and purification method actually, but
i've only seen nice looking mescaline citrate crystals a few times, and they were brownish, its very tricky

freezer works, but it wont do as good of a sep as just siphoning or using a turkey baster...np and junk gets stuck in ice

tip: when salting emulsions form, heat double boil the mix to break emuslions, and run the h20/emulsions thru funnel with cotton ball does amazing job at seperating emulsion and np from the polar
likewise, freezing and thawing will break salting emulsions

acetic is similar in use to citric, huge molecule, and salting/purification is not easy ---when someone can post pic of white crystals made from citric acid or vinegar, i will change my tune

thank you so much, Swim is back using the good old hcl now on the rest- it seems to do the job.
But how does he re-dessolve the gunk and funky crystals from the first run? Make some water with ph 11, and re-extract from there with xylene?

looks like he made a big boo-boo.. Further hcl extractions on the other two pulls resulted in no-thing! He must have gotten it all on the first one, which is a pile of goo and some crystals.
How does he re-dissolve this citric acid mess and re-extract?
Please help, I need my Playa gifts

purple ?
really ?
pix ?

ok, here are some pics Swim took.
One is the four naptha pulls, one is the goo, and the other is the 'purple crystals', but they changed their color to be more red-isch recently.
The goo and the crystals all came out of the first yellow looking naptha jar.
For some reason any subsequent pulls with hcl on the other three naptha pulls resulted only in some yellow slime, definitely only some Boo-Boo. So that means I have all 600g worth of goodies in the goo and crystals, but that is gonna be hard to handle on the playa, he needs to change that.

Muchos Grazias

So am I right in the assumption that I can dissolve these citric acid goo again in ph 12 water, and pull with Naptha to re-extract with hcl? possible or not?

wait a minute.. naphtha? No! You are talking about mescaline, yes? (after all, this is the cacti subforum)

If you did extract with naphtha in the first place, then you have left all your mescaline behind, I hope either you didnt extract with naphtha or that if you did, that you didnt throw your cacti sludge away, because the alkaloids will still be there. Mescaline freebase is not soluble in naphtha, as you can see in the WIKI (petroleum ether = naphtha)

you have to extract it with limonene/xylene/etc...

but yes considering you did extract it with one of those and your goo has the alkaloids, then you could redissolve it in plain water , and AFTER redissolving you add a base to make it high pH, and then pull with your limo/xylene/whatever solvent, and then re-extract with dilute hcl solution and evap that

awesome, thanks man! That's all I needed to verify. Oh, and I did use Xylene, not Naptha (Daa). sorry!
I'll let you guys know how it goes, thanks again!