hey guys

So everybody who tried extracting harmalas from rue already probably noticed how much of a pain n the ass it is.. Usually its better to try to decant as much as possible, but sometimes it so happens, for example in the salt precipitation step, that a lot of the harmalas HCl refuse to decant and stay floating.

So I had an idea to and it worked reasonably good! I got one of those coffee jars where you push down this metal filter, and put a coffee filter paper attached/below this push-down filter. This way one can filter the whole content of liquid in a few minutes.

Now, it doesnt work 100% perfect in the sense that, because the paper filter is not made to be there, sometimes in the parts where the paper is touching the glass, specially if the paper folds, there forms a space where the harmalas start escaping .. Sometimes it takes a couple of tries to get the paper right, but one very important factor I noticed is simply to go very slow! This way, as you go down, the harmalas start depositing and accumulating all over the sides of the push-down filter where it meets the wall, forming like a barrier so that nothing passes through, except air/clear liquid.. So remember to go very slow!

After, one keeps the thick harmalas HCl+little water bottom layer, puts them together and put them again in the coffee filtering jar, so as to get rid of even more liquid..

Here's a pic:






and a quick rundown of the process I did: grind seeds, boil 3x in water+vinegar solution, throw away solids, simmer the liquids to reduce quantity and get manageable ammount... Then put liquid in fridge, to let it decant overnight. next day pour out liquid and keep it, and the bottom decanted solids can be thrown away. Then saturate with salt, mix well, wait a while for harmalas to precipitate and filter with coffee filtering jar as above. After throwing away liquids and keeping the bottom filtered harmalas HCl thick liquid, redissolve it in hot water with bit of vinegar.. Filter the solution through some coarse filter (like funnel with some cotton plug), keeping the liquids.. Then saturate with salt again, filtering again with coffee filtering system. Repeat this salt step 3x or more for purer product (pic was taken on the first run).

Then one can finally put the harmala HCl mush in a plate to dry and store or even consume (but remember, it will probably have quite a bit of salt mixed in), or one can again redissolve in warm water, and then add sodium carbonate to precipitate the freebase harmalas (which will be cleaner, no salt contamination).

I didnt try filtering the freebase with this coffee system, I guess it must work, but for now I have no more time so will store the harmalas as HCl salts and will freebase some other time

Thanks endlessness, I'll be sure to try this out!

Great Idea, thank you!

Endlessness, you've always been a guiding light in the world or Rue extractions

cheers!

SWIM would still like to try an aeropress, but he just hasn't gotten around to buying one.

I tried it, and it works to a certain degree. It's still frickin hard to filter. I also did something wrong, because 50g rue only yielded me a measly 250mg of salty, brown freebase. I think I lost most of it during the several filterings which brought no purity gain. Next time, I'll do a decant and then the whole salting only ONCE.

sorry it didnt work... what was the exact trouble you had when you say 'its hard to filter'? Because for me it was just put the paper under the metal, and be in front of the computer entertained by something while with one hand slowly pressing the machine over the next few minutes...

Did you make a first decant on the rue tea before doing the salt step and machine filtering?

what do you mean with the 'several filterings' that made you lose yield?

and 250mg of salty brown 'freebase' or harmala salts? Thats VERY little indeed.. I got 13g of yellow harmala salts + salt impurities out of 150g rue, doing the salt step 3x.. Even taking out the NaCl and the salt ions from the harmalas in a freebasing step some other day, it will still be a very decent yield Im sure.

are you sure it was saturated enough with salt? because in this step you should definitely not lose any yield, all the harmala will for sure crash when it is salt saturated.. Is it possible the paper was just not properly put and some harmalas were escaping through the sides while you were pressing down the machine?

Is it only me or the phrase in bold sounds worryingly perverted ?

I did the following:

1. 3x30-60 minute cooks of 50g rue
2.Filtering the whole thing through cotton balls
3. Decanting after 24h in the fridge

The whole stuff was pretty much free of particles at this time.

4. Salting with 36g salt per 100ml
5 Filtering
6. Diluting the salts
7. Salting
8. Diluting
9. Freebasing with Sodium carbonate

The problem here was, that the filtering did not went well. There was lots of yellow harmala salt water escaping during each filterstep. The resulting liquid was never brown but still very yellow. So i guess I lost a lot of salts during the filter stage.

10. Pouring the flocks through a coffee filter

BIG mistake! It's very hard to scrape off the freebase!

Well, at least I contributed to the forum in the sense that the next person in line is unlikely to repeat my errors. Maybe it was my french press? I experimented with one and two layers of filtering paper...but both did not work well. After pushing the filter down, I'd have lots of yellow water and lots of the salts would be poured off with it.

salt step seems fine... indeed seems like your issue was harmalas not being properly filtered in the setting

how fast did you push down the filter? how long did it take to filter the whole thing? I did it VERY slowly, like over some minutes

what was the size/shape of the paper filter compared to the metal filter? I cut the paper in round shape like the metal filter, and made sure it was slightly bigger than the metal part, so that, say, 2cm of it was coming off on the top all around..

ahahahhahhaa

hahahahaha indeed it can sound quite bad.

I innocently meant browsing around


btw oblighul, why do you think you have salt contamination in the freebase? Once one redissolves the salt-precipitated stuff in fresh water and then adds sodium carbonate, only the harmalas precipitate, so unless you alread had some undissolved salt before adding the sodium carbonate, then you should have salt-free harmalas.

yep rue is a beeyach to filter and this is a nice solution endlessness.
What had previosly been done is either split the filtering up, like split up 1L into 10 funnels, alternatively a long syringe with a coffee filter cut to size and placed in the end - keeps getting topped up and the film that forms from the harmalas perform in much the same as you stated.

I pressed it down in something like...a minute. Maybe it was too fast? The filter wrapped around the metal filter...

Undissolved salt...well, could be. How I know? It tastes salty