Room temp, left on my dresser with lid on, so no evaporation. It was an absolute treat to find for sure. It will be going in my goodie box when I leave this Sunday for my solo week in the woods. I had already prepared two doses of resin, but now I’m really excited to try what looks like some quite pure needley mescaline.

Wonderful!


I've noticed in some of my jars with lids that the ethyl acetate still evaporates. Unless your pickle jar lid is tight with a seal, you might have a little evaporation.

Looks wonderful Metta-Morpheus looks awesome!

Have a great time in the woods , looking forward to your report!

I will have another try soon with some better equipment and slightly corrected procedure.

Thanks for the update Metta-Morpheus. If your product it is active, we will move the TEK to the main WIKI. Have a great Sunday.

So I finally was successful I think.
Got about 1g of slightly yellow fine powder from around 110g of mixed dried chips. I think it is not fully dry so in the end might be a lil less.

I am not a fan of posting photos here. Otherwise I would post some result pictures.

What I think made the difference was less water in paste and that I used a magnetic stirrer this time.

The water lime cactus paste this time was more like slightly wet crumbles. With the 5th pull added to the tek the water might also be better absorbed into the EA like suggested before.
A huge enforcement was the use of the magnetic stirrer. What a lovely tool. Before I really had to struggle to dissolve the citric acid even at small amounts. With the stirrer it takes some time as well but then quite fast changes from foggy liquid to something like a snowstorm with different sized xtals (I think). No drops at the glass walls. only white dust at the bottom.

Thanks grollum. What water to dry cactus ratio worked for you? The experimental TEK recommends 3:1, along with 1/4 part of lime (I think lime also modulates the wetness/consistency). This is simply the "standard" starting paste for the limo tek.

Regarding dissolving citric acid, I've done it many ways and they all worked - but yes sometimes transparent xtals can stick to the wall (not a big deal though as they can be recovered with water + evap). Tests included simply dumping the citric acid into the extract and letting it slowly dissolve over a day. The usual active mescaline citrate precipitated also, just took longer. Magnetic stirrer works well also.

Looking forward to any bioassay results if you want to share. Wanting one more confirmation before moving the TEK to the main WIKI.

Congratulations!


Can you clarify what you mean by this?


Yes this is how I would describe it. If you watch closely, the snow starts forming in less than 60 seconds, but it's not obvious due to the cloudiness. Also watch for when the cloudiness clears enough that you can see the vortex at the center of the solvent. A flashlight helps.

I went completely with the experimental tek as described in the wiki. so 3:1.
In my experience when using the whole cactus with core and outer waxy skin and spines the resulting paste is more dry while using 3:1 ratio. the same was seen when using many whole small young cacti. whereas when using only the green inner layer without core, spines and no outer skin the paste was more wet. maybe too wet as my beginning tries showed.
Will do a bioassay soon.



With this I wanted to say that it seams better to use 5 pulls instead of 4 pulls like it was before in an older version of the tek. Or maybe my memory is wrong on this.
In my case the combined 5 pulls starting with 300g ending with 4 x 150g almost exactly used 1 liter of ethylacetate. you mentioned before that more pulls might reduce the water droplets because more water gets absorbed from the EA.




Yes , I saw the vortex and realized that things a clearing up.What a lovely indicator!

I can report that several more bioassays have been done by myself and other people with consistently good results from several different extractions 🙂.

However, I've been wondering if there is a way to make the Tek even more robust, specifically during the crystalization step. Reviewing the results we have so far, I think the plant matter present in the extract affects crystalization.

If true it explains why whole cactus needed 20mg/g of citric, while outer skin extracts crystalize with 5 mg/g or less.

It may also explain why the shorter pulls xtalize well. It could also be why Metta-Morpheus's crystals took so long to grow.

I wonder if using cold (fridge) ethyl acetate would result in less unwanted plant material and give larger crystals that are very easy to precipitate. It could make the Tek more robust to different starting plant material and give uniform results (?). I think I'm going to try cold pulls to minimize unwanted plant stuff and see if yield stays about the same with less green in the extract.

Can confirm! The needles that crashed out over significant time(3-4 weeks) after initial extraction were certainly active. I took about 400 mgs with intent to take another 200 mgs a couple hours later. Ended up puking a little over an hour into it, so I didn’t feel like popping the last 200 mgs.(maybe I should have?) Was quite a pleasant buzz that lasted for about 6 hours. Spun staff around the fire by myself. Jammed out to some music. Even a week later on the last day of my vacation I could feel a threshold dose off of the last 200 mgs, which ended up getting combined with a couple shroom gummies.

Another way how to minimize unwanted plant matter extracted into EA could be partially or fully drying the cactus paste.

Edit: Concern would be solvent not picking up dried mescaline. When it dries it does not seem to behave like a free-base going into solvent for some reason (observed when using limonene as a solvent). On the other hand, shorter pulls seemed to help. I can't say why for sure, but once the green gets into the solvent it tends to stay. Can still xtalize when green, but it does seem to take longer and/or need more citric acid to force the xtals out.

Great news, thanks Metta-Morpheus. I have linked the TEK to the main WIKI. Thanks everyone for all your contributions.

We may be able to make the xtalization more uniform for everyone, but for now I think we have something fairly reliable that is repeating. To maximize chances of having an easy xtalization:

- Use outer skin instead of whole plant (whole plant was still OK after increasing the citric acid to 20mg/g).
- Short pulls (30s stir + 150s rest)
- Do not squeeze hard if using a french press (avoid possibly squeezing water out of the paste)
- Make sure no water droplets or particles are in extract before salting (decant/filter if any are seen)
- Use up to 20mg/g of citric acid
- Rest in fridge and/or give more time for xtalization if needed

Also, as mentioned above, cold ethyl acetate pulls will be checked to see if xtalization is easier because of less plant stuff being pulled.

I went ahead and tested freezer chilled ethyl acetate (approx. -15C). I decided to skip fridge temperature tests.

I did 1 minute pulls (like we do for salvia and chilled acetone) with stirring for the entire 60s and no resting. I did 6 pulls total. (1x300g first followed by 5x150g). The paste did not come close to freezing and it's temperature dropped from 22C to 7C (measured with IR gun) by the last pull. There was a small particle in the combined pulls (something I always check for), so I decanted and filtered the combined extract into a fresh clean jar.


Observations for the pulls:

1) More solvent was recovered compared with the standard 3 minute pulls at room temperature (30s stir, 150s rest). first 300g pull gave 250g back with this process (usually we only get 150g). Rest of pulls gave everything back as usual.
2) Extract is less green than usual. The off color is a mild and yellow looking (1st image).
3) I was stirring aggressively with the last pulls to see if any solvent would get caught in the paste, buy it did not.

Salting observations:

1) I dropped in 2mg/g of citric acid into the combined pulls and let it sit without stirring so it would dissolve by diffusion at room temperature. This is less than the usual 5mg/g or 20mg/g. Wanted to see if xtals still formed well.
2) After the usual cloudiness (second image), large needle xtals form over time (3rd image). These are the largest I have seen coming out of ethyl acetate. They look as big as when evaporating from water once all the green plant stuff has been removed. They are spectacular/beautiful to me. However, still need to measure the yield to make sure the chilled solvent was efficient at pulling mescaline.

So far so good. If yields are good it has many positives: should be less sensitive to incoming plant material variability, more solvent is recovered (~95%), and the xtalization is better.

PS: Based on the amount of xtals crashing I think yield is going to be OK. Won't know for sure until it is measured, but I'm not concerned at this time.

That's great to hear. The pictures look good too.

Cold EA will react more slowly with the base for one thing. IIRC, it is also less soluble in water at lower temperatures - while, conversely, calcium hydroxide is more soluble. On the other hand, it will cause condensation under humid conditions - do you have any practical observations about this?

Because mescaline base seems to be highly soluble in EA it should still give a good yield at lower temperatures. At least, that's what I hope

Yep, I was thinking among the same lines.

No condensation related issues that I saw. Everything is great so far with chilled ethyl acetate 👍.

I may have a yield measurent later today or tomorrow. I swirled the extract after a day and all the crystals fell off the wall easily.

Here is a new picture after swirling and having a clear solution. I see crystals that look close to 5mm long leisurely floating around ✨

Results from the chilled ethyl acetate. I ended up using 5mg/g to clear up the cloudiness in the fridge.

- Yield 1.1%. Which is is OK. I've seen between 1.1% and 1.3% before from this cactus powder.
- Crystals are needle like and white. Very beautiful. With the room temp ethyl acetate and this particular ground cacti I get much smaller crystals that are slightly off white. Also, they don't stick to the wall.

I prefer this to the room temp approach because the crystallization is so robust.

I want to update the TEK to use chilled ethyl acetate, I just think it is better. The thing that convinces me is that with chilled acetate the crystallization process should be more robust when people use the TEK on different cacti.

Also, can this TEK be considered food safe? We call the limo TEKs food safe and ethyl acetate's LD50 is about twice of that of limonene (body breaks ethyl acetate down quickly into ethanol and acetic acid). Also, ethyl acetate is used in the food industry and can appear naturally at low levels in fermentation.

Interested in any thoughts.

Good job, Loveall! The improvements continue!

I've thought this tek should be called "food safe" when food safe chemicals are used (obviously not hardware store MEK substitute). I've been running all my CIELO experiments with food grade or pharmaceutical grade chemicals.

I haven't done any cactus extractions recently. Still need to test the 1 hour basing time using the same powder as the 24 and 48 hours basing runs so we have that yield data for a FAQ. I will also test chilled ethyl acetate.

Curious whether we would get the same xtals by using room temperature ethyl acetate for the pulls, then freezing the ethyl acetate before salting with citric acid? In other words, it may be the chilled EA that is the primary influence in forming these needles, and not necessarily less stuff being pulled from the cactus (although you did note the color is less green when doing 1 minute chilled EA pulls). I recall getting these needles in refrigerated EA from a past run, and those runs were not using chilled EA for the pulls.

It is definitely the chilled pull that makes a big difference for me. I think several factors will determine if we get crystalization or long needles:

- Amount of plant material in the extract (less is better, chilled short pulls help here).
- Amount of citric acid (too much and crystals will form to quickly to grow big, too little and complete crystallization may not happen)
- Temperature: avoid quick temperature swings while xtals are forming
- Shaking: With a lot of shaking xtals could be smaller and maybe grow faster

Chilled solvent seems to help a lot with no major downsides. I also notice the xtals did not stick to the walls as when I do room temp pulls.

What really convinces me is that when people have different cacti, or even whole cacti, chilled pulls should be a lot more robust to plant material variability. This is why I want the published TEK to use chilled ethyl acetate, so there are fewer potential issues in the future.

I repeated the chilled ehtyl acetate variation with great results. I really like it and I think it will work well because the extract is cleaner (lighter color and long crystalline needles).

Based on what I'm seeing I've updated our TEK.

https://wiki.dmt-nexus.me/CIELO

I feel like the process is pretty mature and ready for folks to try it out. We can support any questions or issues that come up here.

Still have a few open questions (can the paste reaction time be less than 24h) and perhaps chilled pull time (60s was a guess, but it does seem to work). Also, would other organic acids work (e.g. malic)? However, the TEK seems robust as is and ready for primetime. Hope it brings a smile to folks when they get needles.

Cheers.