So I have seen that if you try to reduce an already prepared ayahuasca tea of 12:1 ratio upon further reducing you will start to lose harmalas in the vapor. I am not sure however on the amounts but the further you reduce down the brighter the distillate water reacted to the black light.

So I used a very diluted caapi tea and wanted to test if reducing the tea down to 18% original volume had noticeable losses of harmalas. I distilled 350ml of tea down to 60ml and NONE of the distillate had any reaction to the uv light. The remaining tea shined the dark green blue hue.

In the future I'll try reattempting this with an already concentrated tea to measure how much loss of harmala there is. My starting tea was around 25mg per 50ml HOWEVER extraction on reduce tea looks like content is over 175mg. Especially considering that my 25mg per 50ml was without the acid wash to remove any insoluble material from the harmalas. Still working on the extraction of the reduced tea.

So my sodium bicarbonate extraction has yielded a very brown needle which I suspect is harmalol?

harmalol a brown crystalline phenolic alkaloid C12H12N2O found in harmala seeds.

Also just visually I'd guess this is over 175 mg of harmalas. I did an extraction on 50ml of the pre-reduced tea and it tested around 25-27mg WITHOUT an acid wash to remove insoluble material. So anyone have any ideas? Maybe there was more material but was so diluted that they didn't precipitate out when I extracted?

Could you describe the reduction process in a bit more detail? I've played around with boiling down a spent Manske solution and fluorescence only appeared in the receiver flask when I was bubbling air through the boiling flask. So in my case it was probably an aerosol from bursting bubbles that entrained the alkaloids (since they'd be in HCl form and not particularly volatile at the 110°C of boiling brine).

It seems likely that concentrated tea would lose material in the form of spray like this, both because of the higher concentration and possibly the increased viscosity. The lower temperature of the air-bubbling experiment suggests that it wasn't due to localised hot-spots in the boiling flask vaporising the alkaloids.

I just boiled down a dilute tea I drink daily. I did a very simple distillation setup with a tube leading up then turned to cool with icepacks. The was a 'reflux' for a while since the tubing would instantly form condensation and return to starter. I also had trouble getting high temp on the liquid since my beaker isn't flat bottom so only outer edge would get the full heat.

A while back I watched a video of a guy that makes ayauhasca in batches of 150kg caapi. He had a few experiments on ideal temperatures and different things like extraction to know amounts and such. He got a liter of prepared caapi tea at 12:1 'mel' level or honey level and mentioned you shouldn't reduce a properly prepared tea further.

He had a lab distillation glass setup and simply started reducing the liquid further collecting the distillate in 200ml volumes and collected 3 vessels. Each had increasing reaction to black light indicating more and more harmalas lost in the vapor. He also did a different distillation on psychotria and suggested making the teas separately since you could want to reduce the psychotria with fresh water a few times to reduce the acidity.

I'll try to find his videos again. He doesn't go very deep in his experiments but shared some interesting things that I've not seen elsewhere.

https://youtu.be/Q7kfUWs_A9c?si=m2AAAtXZi7cfut8M&t=488

I did another a/b to clean up both and the brown harmine was all insoluble when in vinegar again.

The amount of harmine vs harmaline is quite strange for a caapi. However this was a tea made from the second pull of the vine so most of the harmine likely in the first tea I made.

OK thanks. Thought I'd replied to this thread again already but must have just thought about it or typed and not pressed 'post'
What the other guy says ties in with the nebulisation hypothesis, especially since the concentrate is described as "mel" - it basically starts acting like vape juice (now there's a thought...)


The brown stuff may well be harmol or harmalol - caapi chemistry is complicated though! It's likely harm(al)ol is light sensitive, so you might want to think about using low light levels/red light if working with these alkaloids. Analysis beats assumption any day, ofc.