What is the absolute minimum? My shredded bark is immersed in water, but isn't easy to stir. It fills about 2L of the pot and just under a liter of water is used to cover it.

So, is it enough to be stirred without any resistance? With some resistance? Or enough resistance that it requires some effort to move the bark around (shredded in this case).

From this thread: https://www.dmt-nexus.me...&m=761828#post761828



Is this true?

What is the cost of using less water? More cooks?

Anyone? I would of thought it would be an important question considering the teks on this site have different ratios of water:bark.

Lextek: 2000g/1000ml

ACRB TEK: 100g/500ml

Vovin's_tek: 50g/600ml

Maybe I'll just do a test on a 4th or 5th acid cook with little water to see whether extra water is necessary.

Ok since no one is replying to this question (which I am surprised about, possibly an indication of how important this data is if no one knows enough to reply with explaination) I have decided to do some tests.

I used a tek similar to lextek with 2/3 bark and 1/3 water (bark being properly ground but still slightly clumpy not powdered).



It is said that 3 cooks are usually necessary so I decided to do a 4th and 5th cook and measure 3 naphtha pulls from each. They are both looking very rewarding (easily over a gram on the 5th acid cook) and am thinking about a 6th cook! We need some information on exactly how much water is sufficient in absorbing the DMT. What I should do is a control test of 1/3 bark with 2/3 water. But if yields were to increase per acid cook which method would be better? 6x cooks of 1/3 water = 6/18 or 3x cooks of 2/3 water = 6/9... both equal 6 liters of water in the end, only 3/9 bark vs 12/18 bark therefore I would have cooked more bark by doing 1/3 water - 2/3 bark and yielded the same result hypothetically... and also assuming that I don't need a 7th or 8th cook on the 2/3bark-1/3 water version...

These teks need more water science facts... I'm doing my head in here?

I'm far from an expert, but since no else is responding, I'll throw in my thoughts.

If I understand right, the acid phase of an A/B extraction serves 2 purposes. The first is to break down the plant material. I believe that this is why heat is important during this stage. The second is that it converts all of the DMT to a salt. The DMT should exist as a salt in the plant (I recall reading a post a while ago that said it's the tannate salt, but I'm not certain of that), so this is not all that important.

So, the question can really be broken down into two parts: how much acid solution is required to break down the bark, and how much is required to convert the DMT to the appropriate salt and dissolve it?

I expect that the answer to the first is however much it takes to cover the bark, so long as the pH is high enough, enough heat is used, and the cooks are long enough. The answer to the second obviously depends on a few things. The amount of acid needed to convert the DMT to salt form will vary with how much DMT is in the bark, but the amount of water can be adjusted to keep the total volume constant, and excess acid should be used anyways so that it will not matter, so that is not particularly important for the question. The volume of acid/water needed to dissolve the DMT salt will vary with which acid is used and, thus, which salt is obtained. This is because different salts have different solubilities, just as the freebase has a different solubility from the salts. However, because they are polar, the salts tend to be quite water soluble. If I have time, I'll look and see if I can find some exact numbers, but I expect that the volume it takes to cover the bark is more than sufficient to dissolve all of the DMT. If that is the case, then the answer to your question is simply "enough to cover the bark." Otherwise, the answer will be "enough to dissolve the DMT," which will vary with chosen acid and the DMT content of the bark. Assuming, of course, that I have not made any mistakes, overlooked anything, etc. The quote you posted seems to indicate the former. The linked post says:

Dividing by 5, we get that 100 mL would dissolve 2 g of DMT, about what one would expect from 100 g of MHRB. So, if one were using hydrochloric acid of the specified concentration, 150 mL should be more than enough. In my limited experience, it takes more than this to cover the bark, although I have only used shredded.

So, from all of this, I would tentatively answer that the minimum amount of water is enough to cover the bark, multiplied by however many cooks you do, since you will need to cover it each time. I will again say, though, that I am far from an expert. My knowledge of the relevant chemistry is weak, and my practical experience all but nonexistant. I would also add that I do not understand the idea behind multiple acid cooks. I realize that they are supposed to increase yield, but I do not know how. The author of the post you linked says elsewhere in that thread that he only does one cook and has good yields, and cyb's teks only use one cook, so I am very confused on the theory behind multiple cooks. So, obviously, there are some gaps in my knowledge. Take this post with many grains of salt. Hope it helps a little bit at least.

I look forward to the results of your experimentation. I would also suggest trying a single acid cook that takes x times the length of your normal acid cooks, where x is however many cooks you end up doing, then comparing the yields. This would give some information on whether it is the quantity of acid cooks done and/or volume of water used or the length of time cooking that is important. This could also be tested by doing (1/2)x cooks for twice as long or similar. Similarly, it would be good, as you seem to discuss in your last post, to test fewer cooks with more water to see if it is, in fact, the quantity of water that causes multiple cooks to increase yield, or if there is something else causing that.

You want 1ml of vinegar per g of bark. 5% vinegar in this case.
If you have 25% vinegar dilute it first. Or just use 1/4
The amount of water can be minimal but you cant forget that it wont mix at all if its not fully covered and easily stirred. You want to be sure to mix so you usually want at least 25% more water than bark for it to mix.
Also in the end of the extraction when you need to pull its best if there is some good space between the bark in the bottom and the naptha layer on top of the water. Because the bark (if finely shredded or powdered) can stick to the naptha and be annoying.

Also acids cooks are generally bad for the dmt. They are usually kept to a minimum with only a little acidity because the dmt breaks down under heat and acidic conditions.

The acid is usually just there to make sure no dmt is in freebase even tho most dmt in the bark is already salted. No acid can break down plant matter at the concentrations that are commonly used to ensure dmt wont break down (PH of 5 is max). Lye is way better at attacking plant cells at the concentration used. (PH of 14 doesnt hurt the dmt)
Thats why STB teks work just as well as A/B on well shredded bark. The acid is just there to ensure the dmt to dissolve.

Also multiple acid cooks are never done because its simply not worth the work.
Also you dont "cook" the dmt anymore. You heat it. Boiling kills DMT so you dont want that in extractions.
Just let the bark soak in a weak acid. Then just dump lye onto it. Then pull.
No need for multiple acid pulls and naptha pulls from different partitions.
Do everything in 1 big bottle and you should be set. Multiple water/acid bulls are just waste of time.

Thanks for taking the time to reply, although I have some issues with what you say as it is different to what I have found searching on here over the past few years. The point of this thread is to give evidence against what you say "Also multiple acid cooks are never done because its simply not worth the work.". Which contradicts most A/B teks calling for multiple cooks. I am giving evidence by my experience of getting over 1g on the 4th or 5th acid cook (on shredded/grinded bark). I tried a STB on shredded bark but it pulls WAY too many oils/fats and hardly any DMT, so I abandoned it, it also offers no ability to reduce the content of liquid. It was also impossible to filter as it is shredded bark not powdered so you have to filter before doing the pulls. Completely impractical for shredded bark.

What is your evidence for saying "least 25% more water than bark for it to mix"? Have you read what I said in my OP and further posts? This is contrary to the tek on the DMT-Wiki calling for 2000g of bark to 1000l of water. I really was only talking about the increased yields beyond the recommended 3rd cook in relation to powdered/shredded bark. And from what I have researched, boiling does not degrade DMT. Low acidity does however, below PH of 2. If boiling degraded DMT, I doubt there would be over 5 a/b teks calling for low boil or reducing on the DMT-wiki. Unless you were talking of STB in which case yes over 50c would start to degrade but that would be off topic if you were talking about that.

You start by saying i need "1ml of vinegar per g of bark. 5% vinegar in this case. If you have 25% vinegar dilute it first." then say that "The acid is usually just there to make sure no dmt is in freebase even". The exact ratio's are irrelevant so long as the PH doesn't go below 2 and above 4. I have used exact ratios before and had to use more acid to compensate for now enough PH acidity. Regardless, The acidity is not important to this thread, it was purely about water content.

25% more water than bark I dont mean by weight. I mean by volume. If you can cover the bark fully you cant pull. If you cover it just enough it will be nasty with the naptha sticking to the bark.
More water = Less naptha and dmt stuck in bark.

Also the amount of cooks per tek doesnt say anything about if it actually does something. STB more often than not works just as well in practice.

Also do you use acacia or mimosa hostilis. Ofc STB dont work well on acacia.
Make sure not to mix up teks for acacia and mimosa.

Try what you are doing once with just using 1 acid bath and then just pulling with normal water.
There will be no change. I said 1 acid bath is enough. You dont need to acidify 5 times.

For mimosa you dont need to do anything special. Add the bark to liquid so its fully covered and a bit more space. Add the vinegar. Let it soak for an hour or two. Base and pull. No need to boil multiple times and seperate liquids or filter or anything.

To the fact that boiling dmt destroys it. Its more stable salted in water. But the FB will not make it for long when heated.

For your kinda redundant acid cooks I recommend using just so much water that the bark is covered.

But i dont recommend acid cooks at all. For teks up to 500g of bark you just dump all into once container and acid base it.

Which teks are you refering to? Most teks I used dont invole multi step water/acid pulls.

I can't believe that you are telling me to only do one acid cook (and not even cook it) when I am on my 7th acid cook and still pulling DMT, I mean that is actually ridiculous Ulim, no offense... hehe

You have sort of overlooked the point of this thread. I made this thread to get clarification on how much water is necessary (and actually you did help by suggesting
25% more water than bark by volume, which is great! even though it is without any evidence and contrary to the rest of your advice of not using acid boils at all). So, I am looking for whether there is any evidence for that scientifically because (and this is important Ulim) I am getting increased yields on my 4th/5th and now 6th and 7th cook (1 and a half hour boils). I am wanting to study the impact shredded bark has over powdered in relation to water volume. So far from my experiments on shredded acacia bark, a 5th cook is necessary with teks that call for 2/3 bark 1/3 water ratio (which is usually the ratio you end up with in teks that suggest enough water to cover the bark (like Wanderer's Tek and Lextek). So basically, your advice of 25% more water than bark lands me on a 2/3bark - 1/3 water ratio like lextek which means (from my experiments) I need to do 5 cooks (which lextek only calls for 3 cooks). So I guess that is some consensus/closure.

You also are telling me you believe an STB will work better even though you have entirely skipped over my reasons for why I don't believe that is so. The reasons were that IME it pulls WAY too many oils/fats and hardly any DMT, it also offers no ability to reduce the content of liquid, it was also impossible to filter as it is shredded bark (acacia).

Your statement of "Also the amount of cooks per tek doesnt say anything about if it actually does something." is throwing skepticism towards the owners, contributors, moderators of this site who have long studied these practices and probably know a lot more than you about these matters (experience combined).

I really think it is great that you want to contribute and help out but right now you are not really helping me.

Everyone of these teks calls or multiple acid boils (with some like the ACRB thick-light suggesting to cook 4 times and the Wanderer's tek suggesting 5 times):
https://wiki.dmt-nexus.me/Lextek
https://wiki.dmt-nexus.me/Marsofold%27s_tek
https://wiki.dmt-nexus.me/The_DMT_Handbook
https://wiki.dmt-nexus.me/ACRB_Tek_By_Thick-Light
https://wiki.dmt-nexus.m...s_tek#Step_2:_Extraction
https://wiki.dmt-nexus.me/The_Wanderer%27s_Tek

What im saying is that you would get that dmt without the acid cook too. Just look at cybs tek. Great yielding tek. No multi pull acid boil.

Also as i said. You didnt clarify if you use mhrb or acacia at first. Now you did.

Also dont ask questions if you dont want replies

Also people make mistakes. Theres a reason in over the 1000 teks there are only a handfull are used.
Not every tek will be the best. There are teks out there which will give terrible yields and are very labour intensive? Do people need to use them because someone wrote them?

Oh I want replies, just that most of what you say isn't helpful apart from being just enough water to cover the bark. As I say I thought someone maybe able to explain the science behind it but oh well I guess people are busy. So in realizing this, I decide I will just experiment myself and get the results. I found that you were right, as long as you do 5 consecutive cooks for an hour then having 2/3 bark - 1/3 water like lextek calls for is a good idea.

Maybe we could clarify with a mod or someone more experiences as to why they have so many A/B teks if they are redundant because of being "labor intensive". From my experience cybs tek or a stb is labour intensive because of the nature of acacia bark and the reasons i stated above of why it just does not work in my scenario.

Again Mimosa and Acacia are very different in how they should be treated.
I said that in my last posts. Acacia should be boiled to melt the plant oils and fats. And then defatted.
Mimosa just do cybs tek.

And the science behind this is.
DMT is non water soluable as expected from a non polar molecule.
But the acetate is. In 1kg of bark is roughly 20g of DMT. Its highly soluable (No clear data found) but one can expect that 20g of DMT acetate do dissolve in 100ml of hot water.
But what does that mean for us now.
It doesnt mean much because 100ml of hot water in 1kg of bark is like nothing. The bark will just sponge it up.

Thats why i said you need some space above the bark where the dmt can move to.
Because if you just have it in 1 big soaked sponge of bark you will have a hard time getting it out.
If you add naptha to that sponge it will just be stuck in the sponge just like the water.

Now for boiling its different. Because you dont need to pull from the boiled solution because you just dump it all out the best amount of water is just covered. Because this way you are touching all the bark for it to be leeched out of that dmt you want.

This is all there is. No difficult science. If you want to extract something usually you need to use equal volumes of solvent so its covered.

Unless you use a soxhlet.

*crickets

Here is an attempt to give a somewhat scientific answer to this question. I welcome any criticism-- in particular, I'd like to know whether anyone has better ideas about the relative solubilities of DMT in the aqueous and "sludge" phases (see below).

Summary: There is no well-defined "minimum" amount of water for an acid cook, but the more water you use (given a fixed quantity of plant) the more DMT (and every other molecule contained in the plant's cells) you will extract. But this is subject to diminishing returns. Also, dividing the same quantity of water between multiple cooks will give a higher yield (two 500 mL cooks gives a higher yield than a single 1L cook). A rule of thumb is that to extract approximately 90% of the DMT from 100g of plant matter, you should use approximately 2L of water in a single cook, and to get approximately 99%, you can do two sequential 2L cooks.

To see how I arrived at those numbers, let's first set up a simple model.

When you perform an acid cook of a DMT containing plant, you get a heterogenous mixture with two phases: (1) sludge, which consists of plant fiber, water, and assorted other molecules; (2) aqueous, a water solution containing ions and other dissolved molecules.

Now, protonated (i.e. acidified) DMT has a certain solubility (Sa) in the sludge phase and a certain solubility (Sb) in the aqueous phase. At equilibrium, the ratio of concentrations of DMT in the sludge (Ma) and aqueous (Mb) phases will equal the ratio of the solubilities:

Ma/Mb = Sa/Sb

The moles n (i.e. number of molecules) of DMT in a phase is computed by multiplying the concentration by the volume:

na = Ma*Va
nb = Mb*Vb

We want to transfer as much DMT to the aqueous phase as possible. This is certainly true if we are going to throw away the sludge, and it's probably true even if you aren't (since an organic solvent mixed with our solution probably has more access to DMT in the aqueous phase than the sludge). Therefore, we want to maximize the ratio nb/na:

nb / na = (Mb * Vb) / (Ma * Va)

According to this equation, there are four ways to increase nb / na: (1) increasing Mb; (2) increasing Vb; (3) decreasing Ma; (4) decreasing Va. I'm going to assume we can't control the solubilities of DMT in either the sludge or aqueous phase. This means that we can't control Ma or Mb. Similarly, for a fixed amount of plant material, we can't control Va, the volume of sludge. Therefore the only variable we can control is Vb, the volume of the aqueous phase, i.e. the amount of water. The more water we use, the higher the ratio nb/na. So more water will always be better.

Now let's estimate some parameters. I don't know what the solubilities Sa and Sb are. I'd expect protonated DMT to be significantly more soluble in the aqueous phase than the sludge, i.e. Sb > Sa. That's because the sludge probably has a lot of relatively nonpolar molecules. But because I really don't know, let's just estimate them to be the same.

Sb / Sa = Mb / Ma = 1

Also, the volume of 100g dry MHRB powder is approximately 200 mL-- if you wring all the liquid you can out of it (as you should after an acid boil), then the volume of 100g MHRB sludge is approximately the same. (I haven't worked with acacia or other DMT containing plants, but the density and therefore volume per 100g is probably about the same). Then:

nb / na = (Mb * Vb) / (Ma * Va) = (Mb/Ma) * (Vb/Va) = 1 * Vb/200 = Vb / 200

Now let's crunch some numbers. (NOTE: If Sb really is greater than Sa, then our calculations below will overshoot the amount of water actually needed. This means that the calculations are conservative with respect to yield-- if Sb > Sa, then the calculations give us a lower bound on the expected percentage of extracted DMT for a given amount of water.)

To get 50% (nb/na = Vb/Va = 1) of the DMT into the aqueous phase, we would need:

1 * 200 mL = 200 mL

To get 75% (nb/na = Vb/Va = 3), we need:

3 * 200 mL = 600 mL

To get 87.5% (nb/na = Vb/Va = 7), we need:

7 * 200 mL = 1400 mL (1.4 L)

To get 93.75% (nb/na = Vb/Va = 15), we need:

15 * 200 mL = 3000 mL (3 L)

Etc. Notice the diminishing returns. Also, for a given amount of water, if we split it between multiple cooks, we will get a higher yield than for a single cook. For instance, above we showed that one 600 mL cook will get you 75% of the DMT in 100g. But if we instead do two 300 mL cooks, each one will get 60% of the available DMT:

.6 + .6 * (1-.6) = .6 + .6*.4 = .6 +.24 = .84 = 84%

So two 300 mL cooks actually gets us 84% of the available DMT, where 600 mL only gets us 75%. This principle generalizes, so that 3 separate 200 mL cooks in theory gets us more than 84%, etc.

So to sum things up:

- The amount of water to use depends on how much of the DMT you want to get. More water = more DMT.
- There are diminishing returns to using more water. In theory, no finite amount of water could get *all* the DMT.
- Splitting up a given amount of water across multiple cooks yields more DMT than a single cook. For a fixed amount of water, the more cooks, the more DMT.

And according to this model, we can get 90% of the DMT from 100g by doing a single 1.8 L extraction (9 * 200 mL), and we can get 99% by doing two 1.8 L extractions (.9 + .9 * (1-.9)= .99 = 99%). That should be sufficient for anyone.

Barnacle !

... i see no-one acknowledged it, this is one great response, thanks for taking your time to write this all down, will need a few extra reads on this but one thing is sure, i prepared 100 g of mhrb and will first proceed to go get a 2000 ml glass to proceed, was doing it with a 1000 ml one and noticed the naphtha got stuck in there.

and just to make sure when you say to do two 1.8L extractions, that means doing two pulls on a 100g to 1,8L cook, that is should cook again in between two extractions? ... or does that mean i should go for 50 g of bark and do two whole separate cooks?

merci monsieur !