I'm not allowed to add this to gibran2's easy caapi extraction tek but having embarked on it and gotten a little worried about things going wrong I thought I'd post it anyway for anyone new to the process.

I started with about 200g of thick yellow caapi vine, hammered to shreds and did the boil 4x50min with fumaric acid (I have a ton of it sourced for fumarate spice but could only buy a 1kg minimum!). All went well and I probably used more water than I should so I started reducing after 4 boils to about 800ml. Went well, filtered some crud and let it cool while I started on boiling the rest.

The liquid was always like a dark golden brown, especially after filtering so I get worried it doesnt look like the pics. Then to add to that nothing seems to happen after adding the base. I added a bit more, stirring and stirring. No real change. Looked kinda caramel coloured since cooling not dark black like the pics and thats not getting lighter. I panic, maybe its bunk vine? Leave two hours. No change. Damn. I just put it in the fridge and leave it and keep reading this seemingly endless thread full of stories about things going wrong. Must definitely be low alk levels?

Oh well, let me finish the rest of the boils. I do and reduce. Still I'm getting a golden liquid that darkens as its reduced but never as dark as the tek pics. I filter that and let it cool. On the last boil I tried to blend the bark in my blender. Not very successfully, but its a lot finer, adds crud but that gets filtered out reasonably easily. Not easy, but easier than Rue.

So finally I leave the reduced solution to cool and go cloudy (a good sign apparently). Then I add the base. Whoa! No precipitation like the milky stuff the rue makes but definitely there's a clear centimetre or so on the top. Sure enough this increases slowly. That sends me back to the fridge and the other solution I had pretty much given up on. Nearly 5 hours later - and YES! It has a gap at the top.

So there are alks after all! Just need time....and patience. No worries about the colour matches, don't give up hope.

Moral of the story: don't go negative too soon -- distract yourself and give it time, lots of it it seems, patience is key!

Pic: Liquid reducing is golden not black. First 4 boils, base - just starting to show a layer after 5 hours! Second lot of boils next to it, definitely settling faster - maybe just less alks in it I suppose.

Keep up the good work, and I also let it stand long enough after basing, usually over night. Filtering immediately after basing has given me bad experiences, part of the 'milk' fell straight trough the coffee filter, the crystals must grow.

I have continued to let the liquids from the first 4 boils settle. I am in no hurry and kinda enjoying dragging this process out. Boils 5&6 were kept separate and although they seemed to settle a lot faster there was always this dark caramel liquid which seemed to comprise a few layers so after decanting I just kept it all (run out of clear bottles now tho!) and let things settle and then combine the precipitates.

Its been about three weeks of this now. Even relatively clear yellow decanted liquids (supernate?) show settling after a few days. The first batch still is very dark caramel brown liquid and lots of darker brown precipitate. The second batch (boils 5/6) is super clear liquid now so I took most of it and dried it out, having given up on trying to lower the pH after a week of decant, refill, decant...(30 of them!)

The amazing thing was how much powder crystals there were! I did the conversion from base to acid to throw away the dark precipitate twice, not once like gibrans tek. This reduced the precipitate a lot but also lightened the color. I've never gotten it white like his pics (the rue extraction I did was considerably lighter and matched his pics better than this) and it has remained a sort of darker grey-tan color no matter how many decant and re-fill cleaning rounds to drop pH.

The yield from these two pulls on 200g yellow caapi bark (dried pucks about 3"+ diameter) has been 3.42g so far which is way way more than I expected. I never got the pH down to 7-8 as required after 30 rounds of 'washing' so i gave up. But this is already approaching 2% yield and I haven't even started with the first 4 pulls yet!?

Maybe I have cocked this up and have all sorts of other stuff in here, but I don't think so. The water thrown out has been crystal clear ever since round 3-ish and like I said, two base-acid-base rounds to get rid of dark dark muddy precipitate.

I am definitely thinking the amount of time left to settle is contributing to a far greater yield than I have read here but as I am a noob and unqualified in this arena I am not going to make any radical claims, just observation. Obviously not everyone has the time to just leave these things so long but I'm thinking this could be a huge factor in yields. I don't have much $ to source more materials and have had this caapi for years. Just having used a lot of rue lately and read about caapi's difference I dug it out the garage storage box it was in. So getting the most out is important to me.

Am I kidding myself? Have I screwed up or is this a legit amount of harmalas from caapi with much more still to come? Seems like I haven't even got near halfway.

('scuse the spelling on the pic

merkin: any updates since you finished your Caapi extraction. I've been trying this myself and having difficulties. See my thread here. Low yield.

After the second basing I got some precipitate but not much. It seems to take forever to settle and what comes out seems to be a very fine powder.

I was wondering if there was anything to get the precipitate to be more fluffy and less powdery. Its so fine that I think I'm loosing lot during decanting or washing.

Thx