Hello all, new member here and I thought I’d share a pic of my first extraction as my first post. I followed David Barlow’s method, and although with hindsight I know now I made some mistakes in my ratios/timing/techniques, and only extracted a tiny fraction of what I should have been able to, what came out looks pretty good I think! I cleaned the yellow powder I had pulled (using Naptha) with heptane, and these clear/white crystals formed within an hour of the solution sitting at room temp. I have the shot glass covered in the freezer now, and will evaporate the rest of the heptane off tomorrow with some light air flow and dust protection.

Very nice looking crystals

Wow. I should check out this TEK

Nice work! Welcome to the nexus, safe travels

Very impressive I'm way behind you XD

Was MH your starting plant material? How much did you extract that from?


What do you mean? That looks crazy good!



No kidding.

Thanks everyone! I used 20 g finely powderized MH, and followed a combination of his video tutorial and the written directions here. On top of making some mistakes along the way (4 pulls,) I also accidentally spilled some spice-containing solvent when I was transferring between containers at one point...so who knows how much I lost there.

Update: I left the shot glass in the freezer for a few hours, then pulled it out and evaporated the heptane with a fan and foil cover/venturi.



When it came out of the freezer the crystals were still clear/white, but as the heptane evaporated over the course of the day they took on a bit of a yellow stain on the tips. Guessing there were still some suspended plant fats that fell out of the solution once it lost enough volume? Maybe would have been better to pour off the heptane after freezing (through a coffee filter and do another cleaning on anything it might have caught) in order to keep the first recrystalization clear? I’m tempted to clean this again, but there is so little that I hate to do so. Any thoughts on whether it’s safe to just go with what I have, or better to clean this again instead?

Confused by second update. This is the same flask of material as in the first? Suggest re-heat, run through filter paper and wash filter paper with hot solvent. Filter paper will collect contaminants if there are any. Then repeat freeze precipitation. Collect product from ice cold flask by vacuum filtration and wash with cold solvent. Then less impurities get into the product than if evaporating off solvent which deposits anything dissolved in the heptane onto the product.

Yep this is the same flask/product as the first picture I posted. This the first time I’ve ever done anything like this, and I’m a little confused by the process you are describing. Also there are only .3 grams here now, so I’m afraid I’d lose a bunch of it by trying to do everything you mentioned. Anything wrong with adding a bit of hot solvent, mixing up, letting any impurities settle to the bottom again, and pipetting up the clear heptane and transferring to a new shot glass for another recrystallization? I do appreciate your input, thank you!

I'd strongly recommend doing this with proper ventilation; heptane is a toxic and volatile substance.

Thank you for the advice. There was a ceiling fan on full spin directly above where I was evaporating, and an open door to the outside directly around the corner. If I try this again I will make a better cover and evaporate on the porch instead.

Update: Went ahead and did one more heptane clean/recrystalization, and here it is dried out. Looks a lot better then the last evaporation. This time I poured off the heptane as soon as I noticed any hint of yellowing, rather than let it fully evaporate, and that seemed to do the job.

Like someone already said, your product looks crazy good.

I'm not about to offer advice, I will say, I have vaped my extracted spice which has been yellower than what you show, and occasionally even reddish in color.

Beautiful work you've done.

Thanks Sunnyside!

product looks great tho

Nothing wrong with that, your approach accomplishes the same. The benefit to vacuum filtration is you lose less product than with pipetting off since you'll always be leaving some liquid behind and it has product. Then when you evaporate off solvent instead of freeze precipitating any impurities in the solvent will be left in there as well. If you got a vacuum filtration setup you may not have required a second purification step. La Alquimista barely ever needs to recrystalize first product. Your product looks beautiful and the approach La Alquimista takes is probably considered overkill after looking at your results. They spend too much time reading textbooks and prefer the purest most efficient method and they need to be careful with accidentally dropping a dozen science terms in a post.

I would recommend generally to evaporate it in a different vessel.

That way you have 2 containers to handle, but it is quite nicer, as you will keep your nice white crystals and divide them from the yellow ones.

Therefore the next time decant the Heptane and evaporate it in a new vessel and keep the white ones to show off to your friends


Also maybe the yield was lower as expected, because you pulled at a quite low temp? I dont know what temperature is suggested and David Barlow is a genious, but I often encountered that after many pulls there was simply all the "missing" stuff still left in the soup, as the temperature was too low to gather it during the first pulls.

Pulling near boiling range even gets out 90 % with the 1. and 2. pull (if using a 1:3 ratio of Naphtha to soup).