This all seemed simple enough but now I'm second guessing myself about little details...

Step 1. Making a paste from MHRB powder, sodium carbonate and just enough water - no problem.

Step 2. Drying the paste - not too bad. At a guess I waited until about 95% of the water had evaporated. Some of it broke up to a fine consistency but there were also hard little rice-grain sized pieces that were too time consuming to crush individually.

Step 3. I'm pretty damn sure the ethanol I bought turned out to be denatured - the volume of it would probably have been insufficient anyway. I managed to find a slightly bigger bottle of pure acetone so I used that instead. The clumps are still holding together but the clear acetone quickly became a light murky green colour. I can't tell if shaking or letting it sit for much more time is making any difference.

This is as far as I've gotten. I guess I can pour out the acetone into a coffee filter, let it drain, scoop the unfiltered material back into the bottle and see what remains when the filtered acetone solution has evaporated.

How long is it necessary to wait after adding acetone to the dried and re-powdered MHRB + sodium carbonate mixture? Am I supposed to keep shaking the acetone solution during that time?

That all sounds good enough to me.

Probably just stirring it around for a while until you start to get bored should do the trick. You could always follow up with a second pull with fresh acetone and evaporate that separately in order to see how effective the first pull was.

Thank you for confirming that for me - so far, so good! Like I said, this is my first time but now I know what that distinctive DMT smell is from the residue left from the evaporated acetone.

Edit: I just got some pure ethanol - now I can do my own comparison with acetone. I also did a better job of crushing the lumps out of the dry Mimosa and sodium carbonate paste this time. The ethanol seems to dissolve those lumps better anyway...

I've had a little misfire... I know I got something, however crude, from my first small processing round. For the second round I switched from vinegar to citric acid - how careful do I have to be with the strength of the citric acid solution? Like most white vinegar, what I used the first time was 5% acetic acid - I can only guess that the citric acid solution I used was a lot more than 5%. Despite that, I got some much cleaner looking residue that scraped up into a very nearly dry waxy powder. My other likely point of failure was not being careful enough with the butane torch - although the light amount of vapour that came from it tasted fine and didn't irritate my throat or lungs to inhale and hold.

Citric acid is non-volatile and also soluble in acetone and in ethanol so you have to be sure of using sufficient sod.carb to neutralise all of it before the solvent pulls. In that respect, it's somewhat useful to know how much citric acid you're using. The other thing to be aware of is that citric acid is tribasic, meaning it can react with up to 3 equivalents of base - be that DMT or sodium carbonate (although sodium carbonate is a diacid base, so they react in a 2:3 ratio of equivalents).

Anyhow, this means that even a 5% solution of citric acid has a neutralisation power equal to an acetic acid solution of a bit less than 15% when adjusted for differences in molecular weight.

DMT citrates can be a lot more crystalline than waxy DMT acetate. The citrates may also be somewhat less liable to oxidation, which would lead to your perception of them appearing cleaner.

How saturated with target alkaloids can ethanol become? I've been wondering if, rather than multiple pulls, adding all that ethanol at once would achieve the same result... Also, after the initial step of making a MHRB and sodium carbonate solution, is there any point in freezing it? Or has the sodium carbonate already completely broken up the plant cells?

DMT is extremely soluble in ethanol. On the basis of some tests I did, I suspect it might even form something resembling a eutectic mixture. It gets kind of like a solution of ethanol in DMT at some point.

(Interestingly, DMT does freeze precipitate from 50% aqueous ethanol below -18°C.)

Because some of the first pull will, inevitably, remain mechanically trapped within the solid matrix, subsequent pulls will recover a proportion of this amount, and themselves leave a similar remnant. The necessity of repeated pulls rapidly becomes curtailed in accordance with the law of diminishing returns. (My, how enjoyable it just was writing that!)


Freezing may improve yields this way because sodium carbonate is nowhere near as strong a base as sodium hydroxide. Cautiously heating the bark/water/sod.carb paste may help as well.

It's possible that my MHRB isn't so rich in DMT but, this early in my learning process, I'm going to assume I've done something wrong in the first step of my last round of attempted extraction...

I made a MHRB and calcium hydroxide solution but I probably didn't use enough calcium hydroxide - or wait long enough before drying it. The first ethanol pull just didn't give that much - and I probably messed up with the amount of citric acid I used too... So now I'm going out on a very shaky, lack-of-chemistry-knowledge, experimental limb... Rather than keep flushing the solution with ethanol, which I only have a limited supply of, I'm using water and am now waiting for everything to settle so that I can just carefully pour off the clear top layer of liquid. I gather that water pulls a bunch of non-target material and takes longer to evaporate - but I don't care about the evaporation time and, fingers crossed, I can use a much smaller amount of ethanol to pull the desired material from whatever the water leaves behind.

Or have I just shot myself in the foot?

I think you might benefit from some background reading:

Extracting DMT with ethanol, vinegar and sodium carbonate

DMT Extraction Overview

DMT Extraction teks

Water won't pull very much DMT freebase at all.

To extract form MHRB using lime and ethanol, the bark mixture needs to be dry (just like with sodium carbonate). If you had already used sodium carbonate and then added lime you'll have produced some sodium hydroxide. This could complicate matters - drying will become more difficult but you could add a little sodium bicarbonate to neutralise it a bit.

As long as you still have all the various pastes and solutions that you've made along the way, something should still be salvageable. You might have to evaporate all the water and pull from the remaining solids with ethanol.

Somehow I'd only seen the first three pages of that first thread. But now I've read through it all - and re-read certain posts quite a few times. But I'm still messing up. The ambient humidity here is fairly high and I'm wondering if that's why my ethanol pulls require extra heat to fully evaporate. But that's not the worst - yesterday I got to the last clean-up step and actually had something almost dry... It wasn't until I'd scraped it up that I realised how quickly it was pulling moisture back out of the air. None the less, I put some into a glass pipe to see how it would vaporise and note the smell etc... It took an awful lot of heat before it started to vaporise and then didn't have any distinctive smell - I'm almost positive there was practically no DMT in this scraped up residue...

Aside from a possible issue with humidity the other two things I'm suspicious of are the amount of time I've been allowing for the initial solvent soaks - I was just doing a side-by-side with acetone and ethanol. Apparently acetone soaks (or pulls) aren't supposed to be left sitting nearly as long as the one I did... After the days I left these sitting, the liquid layer was quite dark. I had to shine my phone light onto the jar to see where the solid layer met the liquid layer...

I'm also unaware of the necessity of applying higher temperatures to the various stages of this process...

** Edit **

I don't even know how I did it but somehow I set aside all this very dark, thick, sticky stuff. I'd gotten similar looking stuff before and it wasn't good to inhale when I tried to vaporise it so I didn't even try this new stuff. Until just a moment ago - much easier to inhale, almost no numbness on the tip of my tongue and light, gentle closed eye visuals with quite a bit of fairly pleasant (but hard to describe) body sensations. And all without Syrian Rue. Now I just have to figure out how to repeat what I did...