Here is an interesting system: Ethyl Acetate, Water, NaCl (see image below).

Ethyl Acetate absorbs up to 3.40% water when mixed with plain water, and that drops down to 1.86% when mixed with brine (saturated NaCl). This can change with plant material and is only a 1st order approximation for ideal (pure) conditions.

After making a wet alkaline NaCl saturated cacti paste, free base mescaline should move into the ethyl acetate along with 1.9% of water. There should still be ~1.5% of water available to absorb, and one could take advantage of this by directly adding over the counter aquarium sulfuric acid drops (~10%) to the pull. In theory each 35mg drop of sulfuric could crash ~ 20mg of mescaline sulfate dihydrate I believe (or about ~570g for every ml of 10% sulfuric).

Another interesting system is acetone, CaCl2, water. There can be good water/acetone separation (see attached paper). Gibbs triangle is below.

I did a quick test on this system. Made a water/cacti powder/lime paste (75ml/25g/7g). To this I added 40g of anhydrous CaCl2 (the paste became warm and runnier). Pulled with acetone and it became cloudy. Dried over MgSO4 and it cleared up (first jar image below). Added 10% sulfuric and stuff crashes and some of it looked shiny (no idea what it is though).

If I did this again, I would add more CaCl2 (~61.5+ g) to saturate the water and make the acetone even drier and maybe less cloudy. However, that will increase the acetone remaining in the past if I understand the Gibbs triangle. I may also microwave the paste a little bit before basing or adding CaCl2 to see if yield is improved.

Anhydrous CaCl2 is easy to get. Commercial pool products tend to be very pure (100.0% claimed in MSDS). I think this kind of path may be worth looking into more. Cheers.

Another musing:

Ethanol/IPA aqueous extracts result in potent resins. What if before evaporating, the alcohol extract were bombed with highly soluble citric acid? Could this force mescaline citrate to precipitate if enough citric acid is added (similar to manske)?

I may try this in the near future and see what happens. Or does anyone know why this would not work (or have they tried it already)? Seems like it is too simple to not be a thing already on the remote chance that it does work.

Cheers.

Is this essentially the CIELO tek but replacing the ethyl acetate with ethanol/IPA?

Observation: We typically believe with most extraction teks that longer pulls will retrieve more product. However, we're finding in pulling mescaline with ethyl acetate that short 3 minute pulls are more effective. I wonder whether anyone has ever tested 3 minute pulls with ethanol/IPA.

It would be even more direct than CIELO. Instead of basing and extracting the free base (which appears to be very soluble in ethyl acetate) we would extract the natural salt into the aqeous alcohol directly (natural salt into aqueous alcohol is a likely slower extraction than free base into ethyl acetate - but that is just my guess).

Once the natural mescaline salts are in the aqeous alcohol, we overload the system with citric ions. That can force mescaline citrate to crash because of a common ion effect. This last part is similar to CIELO salting when we add excess citric acid.

It may not work, because unlike CIELO, there could be a lot more stuff in the aqueous alcohol interfering with xtalization or stuff that is not mescaline crashing.

So nothing active may crash, or actives may crash along with non-actives, or only non-actives will crash. Also, different things could crash at different citric acid concentrations.

Other acids could work too. Just need a dry acid that is very soluble in aqueous alcohol so the system can be overloaded with common ions.

PS: attaching a paper with some data on citric acid in water/alcohol

Ah. This would be cool if it worked.


If the xtalization doesn't work because of other stuff, perhaps pre-washing the cactus using anhydrous IPA or acetone. Then pulling with the aqueous alcohol.

Which ties into our other thread regarding CIELO and the tek not working for some people. It may be the water percentage which is the main problem. But if it's other stuff interfering with xtalization, maybe we can try pre-washing with IPA, acetone, or ethyl acetate, let cactus dry, then base and pull with ethyl acetate. Maybe I'll try that for fun.

Yep. However, CIELO is giving signs of working for both Metta-Morpheus and grollum now. Well see what they get, but with enough citric in ethyl acetate look like the goods may crash for everyone 🤞

In other news, I've done a 70% IPA pull on cactus powder. It is very dark and opaque. So far added 10% citric acid. No clouds or precipitation so far. It is currently resting in the fridge. I'll keep on adding citric acid later to see if anything interesting happens.

The natural mescaline salt is mescaline malate. The addition of citric acid converts the mescaline malate to mescaline citrate?

If there is no conversion to mescaline citrate, then do we have a common ion?

In the water it is all just ions. Whatever crashes out because of equilibrium constants will crash (the ions will find each other). There is not need to convert anything as I understand it.

Would it be a best-case test to dissolve some mescaline citrate in 70% IPA, then see if it crashes out by adding citric acid?

Yes, I think so.

My understanding is that aqueous alcohol will extract lot of polar stuff from cactus which most likely will keep mescaline citrate in liquid after citric acid is added. In addition, I would bet that solubility of m. citrate in alcohol/water is much higher than in EA (ethyl acetate) with few percent of water.
But of course, I could be wrong, and only experiments will answer this.

I'm nearing 20% citric acid on the 70% IPA extract and nothing is crashing. Not even seeing clouding (maybe it has become a little less clear, but hard to tell since the extract is so dark). It is getting difficult to dissolve more citric acid, so it looks like this won't work.

Looking back at this one, even that 30% water will hold stuff in solution a whole lot. Did you ever try sticking this one in the freezer to see what - if anything - crashes out?

I moved it to the freezer yesterday after seeing this post. No xtals, but some very dark green/black sediment started to form.

I think I'll decant that and add ethyl acetate, see if I can get some xtals to form that way. It would be for recovery purposes, not a practical Tek.

So many ideas didn't work 😅. Really makes me appreciate when we stumble across a system that seems to work well like lime-water paste/ethyl acetate/citric acid.

If it was me I'd be thinking about adding oven-dried sodium chloride to pull some of that water out before adding the EtOAc. It just seems too wet to me otherwise.

Yeah, maybe I should have removed some water.

Cloudiness and gunk did occur when adding more ethyl acetate to the 70% IPA. Adding more citric acid also produced clouds. Among the gunk a small amount of xtals formed, not sure what they are, but mostly just getting gunk to crash 😑

In short, I was not able to "manske" out mescaline citrate out of 70% IPA, even when trying to co-precipitate with ethyl acetate to bring the % water down.

My guess is that there is too much plant stuff forming all kinds of complexes and staying in solution (as doubledog has warned many times). A cleaner solvent pull is needed to not encounter this kind of difficulty.