SOLVED!!!! - I put the green harmalas in to boiling hot water and filtered it through a t-shirt. So much brown gunk still in there! I then did a manske and got yellow crystals.

It was microscopic plant gunk that made it turn green!

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Hi, I performed a manske -> base -> rinse -> manske and filtered the harmala-hcl salts. When I based them they where tan colored and when I acidified and salted them they were dark yellow when filtered and then they dried in to a green color like tree leaves.

I tasted it and it tasted like rusty metal, ate 50mg and no nausea.

Is this common? Anyone know what creates the color difference between freebase and salts? My other harmala-hcl salts are dark brown/yellow.

Thanks

IME highly purified harmala HCl is bright yellow. Red, brown and green is probably a sign of contamination or impurity. The tea from a rue brew can contain microscopic plant solids that are almost impossible to filter out.

Purified harmala freebase is white, tan or light brown. AFAIK pure harmine and harmaline do not have the same color, so the variation in color may be an indication of the proportion of these components.

Is there any way they might have become contaminated with iron? Jar lids? Metal implements? Several iron compounds are green. On the plus side, iron contamination in 50 mg of solids wouldn't be harmful. Other metals would be getting a bit more dodgy.

You used HCl for your acid phases didn't you?

The green is coming from excess hydrochloric acid, but You are absolutely right.

I did a side by side comparison when purifying the green harmalas. Jar A and Jar B, one manske and one base to manske.

A) Hot water and then manske

B) Basified and re manske

A) turned out to be bright yellow like a bannana and as you said had 20-30% microsopic seed mush that was brown. The excess hcl must have dispersed into the water and left it yellow.

B) turned out to be slightly yellow/green again because I dumped in excess HcL to redissolve the basified harmalas.






Funny you say that, my stainless pot has just been burnt right through. I punctured a hole in the bottom today as I notice it leaking slightly.

That could be the metal taste. I didn't think stainless could burn away in to water!



yes, only hcl

Lesson to be learned: don't use HCl for cooking with plain kitchen equipment. Some other member recently reported wrecking his teflon-coated pan by boiling HCl in it. HCl is really much too corrosive with metals. After an experiment I once left some harmala HCL containing residual HCl to dry in my bathroom and when it had dried, I noticed that the HCl vapors had turned the once shiny chrome coating on the faucet into chrome green.

If you must use a strong mineral acid for cooking, use phosphoric acid. It is nonvolatile, so it doesn't stink, and it passivates steel instead of eating it. Brewery stores may carry it food-grade.

With regard to harmalas particularly, I have seen it claimed that the acetates are more soluble than the hydrochlorides, which would imply that vinegar would be a better acid to aid extraction than HCl.

When people insist on still using HCl, it should never be "dumped in", but carefully diluted and/or titrated, as even a slight excess of concentrated HCl causes a huge residual acidity.

The stainless used to make cooking pots is usually recycled, and as such is usually an inferior/contaminated alloy. I once had a stainless pot rust through in a small spot just from salt water.
This is a standard chemistry truism. Acetates of anything are generally quite soluble relative to other salts. With rue alks its likely completely irrelevant. When trying to settle out plant guk from a concentrated solution I've refrigerated it, to then see some rue HCl's crystalize out on the side of the beaker, but when I added salt and cooled it the whole thing turned into slush. The hydrochloride salts are quite soluble at room temperature, and fairly soluble in the cold.
Edit to say my old merck index says harmine hydrochloride dihydrate is soluble in 40 parts water at room temp and 'freely soluble' in hot water

You overdid the HCl on the second acid step. Give your freebase a thorough wash (3 times with warm distilled water) and the green colour should come out.

Yeah thanks, I did a side by side cold and hot water to see which one cleaned better.

Boiling hot water over green harmalas purified a lot better than cold after I filtered again and salted them out.

I think because the more harmalas dissolve and then filtered and then salt out again the more purification can take place.