I've tried everything - cold water/vinegar, cold fumaric acid, and more recently, thinking the problem was lack of heat, hot fumaric acid - NOTHING WORKS. All I extract is this powdery red-brown crap with next to no alkaloid content. Really, really frustrating.

I'm using Maya's "*Yellow* vine (19) powdered". In theory, powdered vine should be even better for extraction than shredded, but what I find, with both cold and hot (crock pot) extractions, the extremely fine (insoluble) particles sink to the bottom in a matter of minutes and cake into this sludge. Once this happens, the pot starts to give off a smell that I suspect may well be vaporised alkaloids that are escaping the brew as gaseous particles.

At any rate, my previous cold water efforts produced only light orange water, implying a low content of alkaloid salts. 50g of caapi in 1000ml of water and 5g of fumaric acid (a bit heavy on the acid, but I wanted to pull as much as possible), heated for 6 hours in a crock pot yielded a good amount of red-orange water after filtering. My successful experience with rue extractions tells me that red-orange indicates an excellent quantity of harmala salts.

When based with lye, the same thing happened as with every other attempt. The freebase alks that precipitate to the bottom LOOK to be the correct colour from the outside of the jar, but when I filter them, this colour is nowhere to be found. What gets filtered is this dark red-brown muck with maybe tiny tiny specks of what might be alkaloids, which all but disappear when dried under a lamp. What's left is dry powerdy rubbish which is not very amenable to being flaked off and reacidified. Reacidification yielded a very poor amount of light orange salt-water, a far cry from the 800ml or so of deep orange-red that I had before base. So either I'm losing a shit ton of alks during the baseing/filtering (how?), or I'm failing to extract the invisible alks from the red-brown powdery muck. I tried again using a lot more lye, same results. using sodium carbonate instead is no better.

What gets me is that in previous cold water attempts a long time ago, I did get substantial flakes of actual tan freebase right off the bat - I just can't remember what I might have done differently? Another time I got tiny needles instead of flakes, which were irretrievable. I don't do multiple boils then combine and reduce. I don't think this is the problem. A second boil on the leftover vine powder yielded only light orange water, so I presumably got the lion's share of the alks out in my first boil - they just got lost somewhere, but where?

Please, if someone can help with this nightmare, I would be ETERNALLY grateful. Extraction rue is so easy it's a joke, but caapi is a total nightmare for me. To emphasise, this is not a problem of low yield, it's a problem of non-existent yield. Why can I see off-white freebase from the outside of the jar that proceeds to vanish when I filter it? Why doesn't it settle properly? What am I doing wrong?!

No one?

Caapi precips have more tendency to stay brown compared to rue.
That is normal.

How long did you let your cold-water soaks sit? Have you bio-assayed your resin? Perhaps it active despite being contaminated with some plant-coloring.

From what you say you *should* be getting the alkaloids out. If you are burning them in the boiled teks then at least on the cold pulls you should get them. Perhaps try a double boiler instead of a pot for warm extractions, or the herbal percolator method.

Thanks both of you for your replies.

I think I might have cracked it. My memories of my early attempts are dim but what I'm doing right now seems to getting the same results as before (I think this is a good thing). My woe in getting the red-brown powder is based on the fact that previously I have managed to get tan freebase right off the bat (like Gibran's tek) on the first basing with at least one of my CWE attempts, so why I'm getting murky stuff now is a bit puzzling. Also, I got the same (looking) red-brown powder in previous extractions, assayed it, and found it almost totally inactive. BUT I think this time around, with heat, the red-brown gunk that filters out LOOKS the same but there ARE alkaloids hidden in it this time. That's my hunch for now anyway. I did an A/B in this round of red-brown gunk, and instead of making the mistake of drying it out and trying to flake it off the filter (dumb), I just scraped the still-wet gunk off with the spoon and into a beaker for acidification, which worked beautifully. Now I'm filtering some lighter, peachy-coloured freebase. It looks like I'm getting there now.

But here is the big, big question - am I using too much lye? It's INCREDIBLY difficult to tell what's actually going on when adding the lye solution to the salt water. It's basically impossible to estimate either the quantity or the purity of the stuff being precipitated out. For some reason, it always looks off-white from the outside, but a very different colour once filtered. What really gets me is how I'll add a little lye, then nice big fluffy clump of f/b precipitate, but if I stir/shake the jar (as you're supposed to, aren't you?) the particles become much smaller and take much longer to precipitate. Does this actually matter? Am I picking up more dirt doing this? When this happens, I get a bit paranoid that I haven't used enough lye, so instead of having to go through the hassle of putting away the lye and the safety gear only to have to get it out again later, I just add more lye before letting it settle. Is there a chance that adding too much lye causes more dirt and unwanted plant matter to precipitate out with the alks? With rue extractions in the past, it seems like pH 10 is insufficient get a proper preciptiation of the alks. As such I usually try to add lye until the pH paper turns purple (so probably easily north of pH 12) Is this too high?