Hi nice people.

this idea has come up before to bag whole syrian rue seeds in advance and keep them there until discarding. Aim: minimal fuss. Used old nicely washed handkerchiefs, the yellow one was used before on rue hence that color. Lower left is a very fine textile which would burst later. It's the middle of the 2nd photo, you can almost see the seeds dark color trough it.

5 x 20 gr of seeds was weighted.
Cable ties close the bags. Someone (was it Sakkadelic?) tried making a knot in the ends to close the textile but the knots came loose, so binding the bag with a fine rope or cable tie is easier & secure.

First boil 1.5 liter for 1.5 hours, all next boils 1 liter of water for 30 minutes. Like 10 drops of phosphoric acid made 1 liter of the regional tap water into pH just below 3. Use any acid of choice or none if you want.

Another idea of this workflow is to reduce minimal water and boiling times and filtering times. The bags are immediately a filter stage on their own. Boiling times are meant to get the water in the seeds. To get the water + the actives out, the bags are squeezed in your hands as hard as possible. That's why the 20 gr seeds choice, once they are swollen they fit perfectly in your hands to squeeze. If you have a press of a kind you might customize the bag size to the press you have. But I think manual squeezing is fine enough on 20 gr seeds each. Pressing or wringing boiled seeds has led to success here at nexus before, getting it all out 'manu militari' turns out to be effective.

After 3 boils the very fine textile handkerchief burst open on the squeeze action, making not loosing much seeds + easy re bagging. So do not choose semi transparent textile for princesses, take the sort you can snot in very well without wetting your hands
Use a wide recipient to wring the bags out, it splatters a bit.
While squeezing lay first the plastic tie in the middle so it doesn't hurt your skin while squeezing. Better to chop of the cable tie end close to its lock to avoid sharp edges, maybe that ripped the bag here as the end was not cut short?

While cooking I put a grocery steaming basket on top of the bags + a cup weight to keep everything submerged. No need for a hard boil because that tends to float the bags, keep it hot steaming without a rumble is good.

Here the first 3 boils, the latest is still settling on the right. Volume 1 liter liquid each. First boil 0.5 liter extra to hydrate the seeds and textiles, ending nicely in 1 liter squeezed result.
Amazingly the squeeze water collect of all boils was filterable trough a paper kitchen towel (not trough a coffee filter though in this stage), as a first acid state filter process. Hmm second actually, first is the bag itself. No need to drag out the vacuum stuff this time, minimal fuss
Curious how many boils are going to be needed.

Based with ammonia to 10 + topping off with NaOH til 12.5
I've seen ammonia making nice crystals and there was plenty available, dirt cheap and safe, so that was used. Extra caustic for nailing the last trace of harmaline.

Nice Jees

Please keep the thread updated as you progress, it'll be great to see how it turns out.

Nice work.

I advocate this trick with rue seeds. Plus the use of a pressure cooker (faster boiling).

very nice
those cable ties are perfect, it's beautiful how they stained!
waiting to see the results though i'm sure they gonna be great..

TY people

What I wanted to display was the working with the bags, the rest is same old but I'll update on details further for the sake of it.

Since I keep having precips the cooking time went up to 1 hour, dunno if that will lead to faster seed exhaustion but it can't hurt anyway.
Each wash still being 1 liter + 10 drops phosphoric acid.

Here's a picture of basified squeezing waters of wash 4, 5 and 6 in sequence. The precips here are VERY fluffy so they suggest a higher yield to the eye.
Each time pH jumps up from just below 3 before cooking to 5.5 - 6 aprox before basing.

In the cooking water I find like 5 escaped seeds, there's a very tiny whole in one of the handkerchiefs. The wringing + squeezing is a hard time for the textiles. This is actually a test to see if they stand up to it.

The waters are clean, yet the squeezing water does not go trough a coffee filter easily, paper kitchen towel works better. In this phase no rigorous filtering of acid state is necessary, that is for later. This is just 'some' filtering, and actually settling/decanting would work too. From wash 6 and up coffee filter worked with a little help at the end. I've not filtered the base state as of yet, only collecting the base precips so far.

Based wash 7, 8, 9 and 10 is in (from left to right), never had so much washes before but these bags keep giving a fluffy layer and I'm wondering to stop here, or madly continue.

The bags are wet for many days, the cooking and wringing is starting to make tiny rips in 1 bag. Only like 10 seeds escape per boil, luckily. It's hard on the textiles and I'm considering for the next time different textile, stronger, maybe cheese cloth style?

not shure using colored cloth is a good idea as a strainer??

By products fron detergents from artificial coloring that can leech out into your product may not be healthy ?

....

You might have a point there if the bottles here show the end product. But there will be more acid/base transitions (without textiles) and I count on 5 manskes too. Would you still think nasty stuff survives all that?

Nevertheless you touch an important point. These here are full cotton textiles, but if someone grabs to synthetic for convenience, it might be a complete unknown element in the mix.
This way of workflow should come with a warning and we should sit still for a moment and consider what kind of textile is suited or doubtful. Thanks for the remark starway6
Any add for this matter is very welcome.

A pillowcase can work nicely as well

That is indeed a stronger type of fabric and usually full cotton. The larger size invites for bigger bags but if one still has to squeeze by hand then smaller portions like 20 - 25 gr is quite ideal. Bigger bag could be used if it fits a press mechanism one has. Something like this would be awesome:



* * *

If there are doubts about ink on textile, one might have it prepared by boiling it hard/long in an acidy water, a few times if necessary until one trusts enough, then use it for cooking seeds. I think this would be safe.

I found that with a pillowcase and some nice vinyl/insulated kitchen gloves, you can pull the pillowcase full of seeds out of your boiling pot/pressure cooker, hold the top of the pillowcase, and spin the bottom to "ring out" the water that's still trapped in there, just like you would with a soaked towel. A press would be even better, but gloves are cheap and take up practically zero space.

^^^ I really like the idea of all seeds in one bag, I'd be thrilled to go with 200gr or more at once. I was waging little bags because they can be so hard wringed+squeezed in the hands. If I can squeeze out a bigger bad as well then I'm sold. Gonna give it a shot in next batch. And yes the turning gives the best result.

Decided to stop at the 10 washes (never did so much before) and proceed from there. I'll keep the seeds for a while, maybe to check out a bigger bag experiment on them. We'll see.

Sewing the seeds into a linen tea towel might also work nicely. That's some good, stout fabric if you get the right sort.

The lute is in after 5 manskes, centrifuged the salt water out of the last one, dried: 6.12gr of 100gr dry seeds, good for 5.2gr freebase calculated --> happy puppy today.

Since I was able to paper-kitchen-towel-filter all the first brewing waters (no vacuum needed) I was able to coffee filter their based states to catch the precips. So it is a clean workflow, the cleanest I did.

Because the tea was pretty clean to work with I decided to do no extra A/B transition to clean it up, but diving straight into the manskes and don't look back. The filter water of manske 5 was still (very) translucent yellow so I based it and found still 'the slime' precipitating while the yellow color disappeared. I think this is no harmalas, so suspecting quinazolines, yet after 5 manskes? More manskes will be made to see what gets.

Multiple little bags handkerchiefs are OK but not top heaven, a more ideal textile trick must be possible to squeeze 100gr seeds all at once under high tension, the ideas are already growing. I'm thinking of an inner bag to hold the seeds together (like in a sock or so, zip tie closed) and an outer textile (like tea towel) for exerting brute force on. The sock has the finest mesh to act as a filter but the brute forces will be carried out on a more rougher textile like a tea linnen (which must not be closed per se because of the inner bag).
We'll see

Just to recap; that's the loose-ish rolled paper towel in the stem of the funnel, is it?


Sounds like we're veering towards hydraulic press territory here. Easy to make with a car bottle jack, plenty of stuff to see on YouTube.

I used this type, 1 sheet folded in a size 4 coffee filter funnel.


I haven't thought about using a power aided press, the idea is tempting to say the least, but will inquire some stiff tinkering I guess. I'll youtube on it, if you have links already they are welcome

https://www.youtube.com/...homemade+hydraulic+press

Very straightforward:

Uh oh those seeds have something coming
Then an old style car jack without hydraulics should perform as well I suppose.