So this is my method for extracting DMT from MHRB, based on what I have found to be the most useful parts of several other STB teks, as well as my own research and experience. I am a perfectionist and love science projects, so I tend to be very thorough, and so many of these steps are not entirely necessary but I find them to be beneficial to my final product. I'm sure there are things i have missed, as this is an early draft of what i hope to eventually be my own tek, so always do your own additional research as well in case i, or anyone else, for that matter, missed anything.
Safety-wise, always work in a well ventilated area when working with volatile solvents, such as naptha, and always wear long sleeves, long pants, and appropriate protective gloves, footwear, and goggles when handling these things in case of any accidents. Also in case of any accidents, always keep a large bottle of vinegar nearby in case of any lye spills, and make sure it is easily opened and quickly accessible. Again, i may be missing a few things, so always do your own additional research before attempting to work with these potentially hazardous substances.
1. Prep
a) Preparing your bark.
-Freeze your bark as cold as your freezer will allow. After 4-12 hours of initial freeze time, you can either break it up by hand to save your blender some wear and tear, or you can just go straight to the blender.
-Take small amounts out of the freezer at a time and break up your bark by hand as much as possible. Since it is frozen, this should not be difficult, especially with a small pair of garden clippers or a pair of strong scissors. As you finish breaking up bark, place it back into the freezer while you systematically break up the rest. Once this is all broken up, personally, i like to take it all back out of the freezer, let it thaw, and refreeze it, repeating this several times. Again, this may be overkill, but the more you do this, the more the cellular structure of the bark breaks open, creating less work for your base to break it down once it is fully powdered.
-Blend your bark. While it is frozen, place small amounts of bark into your blender and begin to pulverize them. To save your blender some work and wear and tear, on occasion, stop the blending process long enough for the dust inside to settle(~5-15 minutes should be sufficient) and carefully open it, carefully removing the powder into whatever collection vessel you choose to use. It is important that you let the dust settle before opening it. In the past, i have opened it early out of impatience throughout the process to remove the powder, and ended up losing ~5g of bark out of the 50 i started with. Continue with this blending process, adding more frozen bark as necessary, until it is all powdered. Often you may find a little tumbleweed of unblendable bark fiber in your blender; you can either refreeze it and powder it further, or just add it to the lye water when it is time to do so.
b) Mix your lye solution.
-Generally, most teks recommend using 500-750 mL of water and 1 g of lye for every gram of mhrb, however, i find that any more than 600 mL of water to be too much liquid to work with in the size of mason jars i use, and since the ratio is supposed to create a specific pH level, i say just skip the ratios and buy a pack of pH paper from a garden store, adding enough lye to the water to reach at least a pH of 13.
-IMPORTANT: ALWAYS MAKE SURE TO ADD LYE TO WATER, NEVER ADD WATER TO LYE!!!!! This can cause a violent reaction if done incorrectly!!!
-Also, be aware that the water heats up and can easily boil if you add the lye too quickly, so make sure you add it slowly to a vessel that is appropriate for such things, like a pyrex flask or a very clean empty patron bottle, for example.
2. Add the powdered bark to your lye solution.
-Place your lye solution into your extraction vessel
-Add your bark to the lye solution. Personally, i usually dont do more than 50 g of bark per vessel. This seems to provide a higher yield over more bulky extractions targeting 100+ grams of bark per extraction vessel
-Mix the two using a glass stir rod or your glass turkey baster
-Cover the mixture with doubled up plastic Ziploc-brand samdwich bags(much stronger plastic than other bags) and seal it with a rubber band or two. This way, if there is any gas expansion or pressure changes of any sort, it wont damage the vessel.
-Leave to dissolve for at least an hour or two, but preferably overnight, carefully swirling the jar on occasion.
3. Pulling with naptha
-For your first few pulls, if you are looking for as pure of a product as possible, do not use heat until your last few steps just to squeeze the last bits of spice out of the mimosa soup.
-For the first pull, take a small amount of naptha, preferably approximately 60-100 mL naptha per 500-600 mL of water, and add it to your mimosa/lye mixture. Replace the ziploc baggie(s) without the rubber bands, and replace the actual mason jar lid and screw top over the top of the baggie(s) in such a way that the plastic protects the lid(and therefore also the rubber seal on the lid) from exposure to any of the chemicals being used
-Note: I realize that ziploc baggies are made out of a plastic that is technically soluble in naptha, however, in the minimal amount of contact with the naptha and frequent changing of the baggies, i have personally never noticed any degradations in the baggies or impurities in the final product, although it is true that the final product could still have sone and i just dont notice it
-Shake, shake, shake that jar vigorously. Make sure that it is as well mixed as possible and then some. Emulsions are not as much of an issue with mhrb. However, if you do get emulsions, place the vessel in a warm(NOT hot) water bath, and it should separate fairly quickly.
-When you are done shaking it, make SURE to remove the lid and screw top, leaving only the plastic baggies behind, and, if they are damaged, replace them, and place the rubber bands back over the baggies to seal the lid, in such a way that if there is a pressure buildup or drop, it wil only flex the plastic and possibly be realeased from the sides through the rubber band seal.
-Leave it to separate for approximately 15 minutes, or up to an hour, and shake again. After about 4-6 shaking cycles, leave it to separate for at least an hour, maybe 3 or 4, and then do your pull.
-Before pulling, be sure to have your glass turkey baster nearby, as well as a thin, round-bottom vessel, such as a shot glass(DO NOT use this shot glass for ANY OTHER PURPOSE afterward, no matter how well you clean it, it is still possibly pretty toxic)
-To perform a pull, take your turkey baster, press on the bulb on only one side with a finger or thumb, then place the nozzle into the approximate center of the naptha later, preferably at an angle so as to draw up as little of the mimosa layer below as possible. SLOWLY release the pressure on the bulb with your finger, and if any of the lye mixture accidentally comes up with it, just let the tip of the baster sit in the middle of the naptha layer, still at an angle, and most of it should slowly leave the tip of the baster. If any does remain, which will be more and more likely as you pull more and more of the naptha layer out, place it into the shot glass or thin vessel. Once you have gone through a majority of the naptha and can no longer pull any more out, you likely will have had enough lye pull up with the naptha to fill the shot glass a fair amount, and it should be easier to further separate the remaining liquids in this vessel. Now your naptha is ready for freeze precipitation, which you will want to do only one or two pulls at a time to monitor progress and decide how many pulls to do. The freeze precipitation stage will be discussed further in Step 4
-Repeat this pulling process until your yield(after freeze precipitation) is no longer "worth it", then begin placing the extraction vessel in a warm(NOT hot) water bath after shaking, as previously discussed. This will pull the final remaining bits of spice out of the bark mixture, along with accompanying plant fats, as previously mentioned. Continue to do this until you no longer find the yeilded results to be worth the effort. As a general rule of thumb, you should be getting between 1%(good/normal) and 2%(great) yield in total between all if the pulls.
4. Freeze Precipitation
-Place pulled naptha into a glass dish with a flat bottom, and cover it up VERY WELL. It is best if you use a dish that comes with its own lid so that you know it wont leak fumes. If you do not cover it properly, your freezer and everything in it will smell heavily of naptha and have a thin coat of naptha covering it, and the only way to fix or get rid of this is to defrost your freezer, and honestly i would just throw all that food away. You dont want to accidentally consume naptha. So make sure you seal it properly.
-Once the dish with the naptha in it is sealed properly, place it in the freezer, trying to put it in the coldest spot possible.
-Ideally, your freezer should be set cold enough to freeze ice cream HARD(or so i have been told), and if it doesnt, it will still work, but you may want to evaporate all of your naptha used in the process after you are done to retrieve any lost spice.
-Leave your precipitation dish in the freezer, undisturbed, for at least 24 hours(less if you're freezer is high performance). Try your best not to open your freezer door during this time to guarentee the coldest possible temperatures. This step is why you don't want to use a lot of naptha for your pulls in the first place, because the less you use, the more of the pulled dmt precipitates, and the less you have to evaporate later.
-Remove the precipitation vessel from the freezer. When you remove it, many people are tempted to immediately pop off the lid and pour or siphon off the liquid as quickly as possible. DO NOT DO THIS. Immediately after removing it from the freezer, both the naptha and container are below the freezing temperature of water, and so any humidity in the air will condense on your naptha and on your precipitation dish, forming a sticky goo and little ice crystals forming on the surface of the naptha that looks like floating dmt crystals but it is NOT. Instead, WAIT FOR THE DISH TO REACH ROOM TEMPERATURE. You can tell this when you no longer see condensation on the outside of the container. It is common for people to think that if the naptha raises back to room temperature, it will redissolve the dmt, however this is simply not true. The naptha needs additional heat to redissolve the dmt, so at room temperature, it should be perfectly fine.
-Once the dish is at room temperature, carefully remove the lid, trying not to jostle the naptha too much, which could dislodge some dmt crystals from the bottom, making it slightly more difficult to siphon or pour off the naptha, trying not to lose those loose crystals.
-Use your turkey baster to carefully remove the naptha from the dish, and carefully pour off whatever is left over.
-Leave crystals to dry before scraping them up. When there is no longer a smell, you can start scraping, then spread them back out to further dry. Do not use a fan to do this. Ive read mixed opinions on this, but to be safe, i try not to use a fan when i do this because it supposedly could convert to dmt-oxide more quickly, or at the very least, the fan could dislodge and blow crystals around.
Once this process is finished, your spice is ready to do whatever you want to with it, and you can repeat the process as much as you like! You should get anywhere from 500 mg up to a gram of dmt from this process, generally speaking, so if you didnt get that much, either your bark has degraded or you still have more left to extract. Repeat this pulling and precipitating process until you have gotten as much spice as possible out of it. You can reuse your naptha several times, so at the end, you can evaporate the rest off to get back whatever never precipitated.
As previously mentioned, this is an early draft of what i hope to eventually be a tek, so if anyone has any feedback or notes, please let me know. I am certainly not an expert, nor do i pretend to be, so any and all input is very welcomed and appreciated.
I come from a place beyond the clouds. Only Shponglese is spoken there, and that is my native language. I am only just learning english, so if i say anything strange, it is probably a miscommunication on my part and i apologize. I sdsrrrbablenta to all of you and i ghope tjat you can forgive any miscommunications.
May the Elves ever be in your favor,
~~~Shnuffles