Hello! This is my first post but I have read previous posts extensively, and from this site my friend derived his method that resulted in super pure spice-but not much of it.

SWIM begins his A/B by dropping HCl into distilled water until he achieves a pH of 4. He would have used vinegar, but he read on this site that acetic acid is less effective at salting the spice. He then boils his kilo of MHRB (ON THE STOVE... I found the crockpot to be a poor choice for pouring the liquid off, and stoves get much hotter anyway) for at least two hours, but notices that the hot mixture is very difficult to separate. For this reason, he allows the mixture to cool for at least six hours before pouring the water through some cheesecloth. He repeats this process for a total of three acid-cooks.

SWIM then places the liquid in a jug and leaves it in the refrigerator so that the fats in the solution stick to the bottom of the jug. The liquid is then decanted into a second jug, and sometimes he is compelled to repeat this process until the liquid looks less like wet mud and more like cherry Cool-Aid.

After the decantation, he heats the liquid to evaporate it down to a single liter per kilogram of root bark. He then waits 15 minutes (as prescribed in the DMT handbook) and adds a one liter aqueous solution of 110 grams NaOH to the mix. Fearing this may not be enough, he may add some additional NaOH. Without an electric pH reader SWIM cannot accurately determine the pH of the rootbark-his litmus paper turns black when dipped in the dark solution. He fears that a shortage of lye may be his problem but since he is an inexperienced spice cook, he is at the mercy of the gods, so to speak. This being only his third extract he admits that his approximations are all but meaningless.

After the lye is added, but before the solution is allowed to cool, he adds naphtha to the liquid at a ratio of two parts aqueous freebase and one part solvent. After shaking the solution violently but ensuring that pressure does not destroy the jug, he pours it into his separator funnel and drains off the bottom, a-la-mode. Three or four pulls, until the solvent starts to come out clear. Sometimes the solvent it not dense enough to freeze precipitate (SWIMS preference) so he evaporates off the naphtha until it is quite cloudy and then freezes it, dumps off the liquid (into a glass, for reuse or evaporation) and dries the crystals by flipping the glass dish upside down and letting the pooled naphtha drain off.

His most recent extraction only yielded a meager 4.4 grams - from a kilogram of Mimosa Hostilis root bark. He wants to know why his yield was so small. Please help him!

Dear civre4monkey,

I dont even know where to begin.... I know you had a difficult outing of it with that extraction. Reading what you did was tough also.

You are handling your product way too much. You are making the extraction way to difficult. IMO, You are throwing your DMT away every step of the way.

Please dont take this the wrong way, I am sincerely attempting to help you here.

I have a few questions and a suggestion. But first this-



First off, what is super pure and how do you know it is super pure? and super pure compared to what? Compared to other teks?

Just wondering, civre4monkey, do you think that other teks such as STB dont extract pure DMT? I'm attempting to understand your reasoning for doing your tek the way you do.

My guess is you dont have allot of experience extracting and that is perfectly okay, everyone must start somewhere.

A couple of issues. First, the size, 1 kilo is decent sized. if youre just learning, its tough, hell its tough for allot of experienced guys. The problem with big is, when you screw up you lose big. Start off small, learn it, perfect it, and then work your way up in size, if you must. Always plan to minimize loss.

I know allot of folks like the acid boils and I dont really get it. If you really know what youre doing, I guess it doesnt matter. MHRB really doesnt need to go through a de-fatting process or a salting process. You can completely skip this step and go straight to basification. If you really want to add an acidification phase, Just soak the bark in vinager for a week and then go straight to basification.

Once your bark is basified, add solvent. Shake your solvent up in the basic solution a few times and remove the solvent.

Take your solvent and put it in the freezer. Precipitate your spice out.

Done.

Almost the entire extract can be done in ONE CONTAINER. No boiling ,filtering, reducing, no changing containers until the very last step.

sooo- in a 1 quart jar put your powderized MHRB in it, say 100-200grams.
Acidify by just wetting/covering the bark. let stand a few days.
to basify use a 1:1 ratio bark to lye add lye to water first, then basified water to bark.
The bark will turn black, thats how you know you have enough Base.
add 100ml of Naphtha to the mix, roll it around a while.
pull naphtha and put it in a jar or glass container and put it into the freezer.
collect your spice.

Thats it.

yea, there may be a couple little other tiny steps in there but thats it.

Acid
Base
solvent
Pull and freeze

DONE!

you are throwing your spice away handleing soo much.

By the way you can pull high purity spice from a simple STB, and you can do it without a huge loss.

This is just my 2 cents.

^ Totally agree with Ice House...He said it all right there...
Oh and 4.4 is nearly 100 doses...not soo meager.

Thanks for the quick replies! I should have been more specific.



SWIM had a bad experience with his first extraction doing STB and yielded a gooey material that required additional A/B extractions anyway. SWIM saved time by acidifying first, before doing a mini-A/B on the gunk that he gets from STBs. Maybe he did his first STB wrong, but the gunk is a common symptom of STB extractions according to the FAQ section of this website.

SWIM wants to know what he did wrong in his extraction...He appreciates the suggestion but he is convinced that his methodology is only slightly flawed. No need to go back to the drawing board, I hope.

And Cyb- I know 4.4 is alot but it was split among several friends, so we expected to have more spice for everyone.

How do you know it's fats the stuff that stuck to the bottom of the jar after the overnight refrigeration? Fats will almost always float to the surface, not precipitate out to the bottom. Your precipitates may, among other things, have included a substantial amount of alkaloids.

As you are (as seen from your post) inexperienced with extractions and the chemistry behind them you're better off avoiding these "modifications" and weird extra steps and perform the tek to the T.

In an aqueous solution, fat (and leftover mimosa) would sink to the bottom of the jug not float to the top. I did this as an alternative to chemical defatting; Vovin's tek suggests using this method. Not the tek on this website but the PDF file that comes up when you google it. There is a chance that some spice was stuck to the bottom of the jug. I think that could be the, Infundibilum.

Ever put the aqueous solution known as "chicken soup" in the fridge? The fat rises to the top of the solution and condenses, allowing people to "skim" the fat off the top. Why is the aqueous solution known as "mhrb tea" any different? See also oil and vinegar (the fatty oil sits atop the aqueous vinegar). Kitchen chemistry...it's not all about the drugs

That is not correct - the always less dense fats afloat over the considerably dense mhrb soup.

Sorry I should have been more specific. I was referring to the fats and oils in the leftover MHRB particles in the solution, which would naturally sink to the bottom after being in the fridge overnight. I did the method prescribed by Vovin and Lextek, but I guess it makes sense that any leftover mhrb would be left in the solution after NP pulls. I probably lost yield for that, as well. I have a few more questions though:

1. When doing an A/B extraction how much lye do you generally use?

2. What temperature should the mhrb tea/naphtha be?

I just got another shipment of mhrb so Im starting acid cooks right now.