Thank you for the explanation. Especially the point with the chronology was enlightend. I think I now understand. When I followed your words right, wouldn't it be best to use as pure as possible ethanol for the job? Or is the percentage of water in there neglectable because you don't boil it and 3 days is not long enough for the water to do its job? Where I live ethanol has huge taxes on it so isopropanol 99,9 % is the cheapest to get. I read this is doing the Job as well but might take more time?

Pure ethanol is not very good solvent for natural mescaline salt, especially when working with cactus powder full of pectin, so no, it can not be used.
Don't use pure ethanol or IPA.
You need some water in the alcohol. Of course, this small amount of water still extract something we do not want, but in a low quantity.

I would not use drinkable ethanol, it is too expensive due to taxes and you will have to evaporate it.
Try to find technical grade ethanol with NO RESIDUE after evaporation.

You can also extract mescaline as freebase with alkaline ethanol (or IPA), but that's another story.

Do you think it would helpful to use pectin enzyme to break down the pectin?

Last extraction I used Pectinase and it helped cut the viscosity substantially. Didn't do away with the mucilage entirely but it did help.

Cool. How much Pectinase did you use? Was it powdered cactus? Boiled with water, cold water extract, or alcohol? Thanks!

This is fascinating but also a bit confusing, so please bear with me. I live in the US and have access to the usual pharmacy forms of alcohol like 70% and 91% IPA. I also have access to 190 Proof Everclear.

I will be using 100 g San Pedro Powder. Based on what I have read in this thread, my thought is to do 3-4 pulls with alcohol and then dissolve the resulting resin in acidic water, followed by filtering and evaporating. How does this sound? What form of alcohol should I use? I don't mind the expense of the Everclear, if it results in a higher quality resin without any additive impurities that may be in other forms of alcohol. But does the 190 Proof Everclear have enough water in it?

Yes, pectinase would definitely help with viscosity. But break down products will be still there.

Belenus, I would add some water to Everclear, but you can try it directly as is and report outcome here. Could be interesting to know, maybe 95% is totally ok. I do not know.

I used 95 percent ethanol (everclear) to make half of my resin, and 70% isopropyl to make the other half. Consumed together. Not very scientific. Sorry about that. Anyway, twas very effective.

Next time I will perform this extraction with 70% isopropyl, no everclear.

Based on my experience, I would reckon you could use 95% everclear for getting of the noble compounds. Isopropyl is much cheaper.

Last night I did an extraction using 100 g San Pedro powder and 70% Rubbing (Isopropyl) alcohol. Added alcohol to powder in quart jar, shook several times vigorously, let settle about 2 hours, decanted and filtered. Repeated 3 times. Evaporated the decanted liquid on low heat with hot plate double-boiler set up. Scraped and set aside the resulting resin in the glass pan, added 190-proof Everclear to dissolve remaining bits of residue, evaporated and scraped again. The weight of the resulting resin was 22 grams (weight shown in photo is total of resin + the dish it is sitting on). Much of the fine scrapings are very crystally.

Today I will add filtered lemon juice to distilled water at a ratio of 1:2 to approximate a pH of 4 and will dissolve the resin into it, then filter and evaporate. I'll report back when complete.

So after extracting with 70% Isopropyl alcohol I ended up with 22g of resin. I decided to try the recommendation of a member here of dissolving the resin in acidified water to purify the extract further and the results were interesting. I took approximately 12 g of the resin and tried to dissolve in warm pH 4 filtered lemon + water but it would not easily dissolve so I put it in a small blender which did the trick, but the resulting liquid was like a greenish milk. I left it in the refrigerator overnight to settle out which did very little, so I evaporated the liquid in a double boiler which resulted in a taffy-like resin. What is interesting is that the resulting taffy resin must have retained water because it actually gained weight from 12 g to 20.6 g and there was no crystallization present like there was with the resin from the alcohol extract.

I took the other 10 g of resin that I had made with the 70% IPA and dissolved it in 190 proof Everclear, figuring that evaporating the liquid would remove any unwanted remaining IPA residue. The resulting resin is flaky and crystally.


70% IPA resin dissolved in blender with approx pH 4 distilled water (water and lemon juice)



Resin left after evaporating water mixture:



Here is the other half of the 70% IPA resin after being dissolved in Everclear and evaporated:

Alcohol resin does not fully dissolve in water, some dark green material stays undissolved.
It seems that the blending caused quite heavy and permanent emulsion of this stuff, water and some water-soluble fraction of cactus.

Yes fascinating.. It will be interesting to learn how psychoactive the material is.

This seems pointless as neither the cactus nor the resin was treated with base at any point. Some people have suggested that citric acid may contribute to emulsions but, to be fair, malate (from malic acid, said to be the principle acid in cacti and hence the salt form of mescaline extracted with this method) isn't necessarily all that different:
citric - HOC(COOH)(CH2COOH)2
malic - HOCH(COOH)CH2COOH

Good job for trying this out though, looking forward to hearing of the results of any potential trials. Silver lining - it's also useful to know not to blenderize alcohol resin with water!

Also, for those who are left with a sticky goo that is difficult to handle, I usually place this between waxy baking paper, press it down and freeze it.

That way when it comes time to consume it you can just snap off chunks and swallow them like pills. It quickly gets gooey again when out of the freezer for too long

Just curious if anyone has tried drying your alcohol/powder mix in a dehydrator? Maybe with a fruit leather tray? I was looking for something quick and easy, but seems like this could be unsafe.

Any other suggestions for drying? I’m curious how long it would take an an ethanol mix to evap next to a fan.

As far as filtering, what seems to work the best? I was thinking either a funnel with a coffee filter, or cotton balls in the neck.

I did at first but felt unsafe and also hard to fit into most dehydrators with a wide enough pan that you can also scrape.

The water+ISO at 70% can take 2-3 days to dry and will be goopy at the end usually.

Buchner funnel is the best, cheap on amazon (120mm or bigger) + vacuum pump + filtering flask and filter papers to fit Buchner funnel. (research that some on google / amazon).
This saves a lot of alcohol, makes it simpler to just wash out till clear running through, it is hard to filter it other ways usually.

Otherwise you are stuck with the pulling off the top and adding more ISO which increases evap time and cost + effort and overall time to get it done. I have found that with a Buchner you don't really have to soak more than 12 hours it feels like so far. You can extract 300g with 2000m ISO and evap for 2-3 days and get 60g+ of resin (consistenly 20g per 100g). Otherwise it varies and is a struggle / voodoo guess work.

Oh and use Pectinase, pure if you can find it, a tsp per 100g seems good, add 50C heat to it which will help break it down too for increasing the efficacy and speed in general.

I’m at the late stages of a cactus prep similar to those here. Do you have any suggestions on dosage or any additional post processing steps.

First here is what I’ve done so far:

Batch1:
Started with a small 12” Bridgesii mid-cut that’s been sitting under the bed for a year. Remove spines, sliced to stars, and removed core. Left the outer skin intact. Dehydrated over night and ground to a fine powder: 50g dry

Batch2:
Had some old powder from a thick Bluish Peruvianus, that I dehydrated 6-8 mo ago. This one also had the core removed and also the outer clear skin layer removed.
This batch was with 54g powder.


Each batch was placed in jar and covered with Everclear at 95% alchohol. On the second and third pulls I added a bit of water.

Stirred the batch every couple hours and then let soak overnight.

Now for the fun part. I used an Aeropress coffee plunger to filter and press out the juice. If you are familiar with the invert method, you just flip the cylinder upside down with the plunger facing up and fill with coffee and water. In my case I poored the top clear-ish layer from my jar into the Aeropress. Each pull I used two standard paper filter discs. Screw on the filter, flip, place over the collection jar and press.

For each pull I do this twice. In the second step, I placed the remaining plant material into the inverted Aeropress, put the filter on, flip and press out the remaining juice.

The best part of the Aeropress is very satisfying Pedro Puck you get at the end. Flip the AP, filter end up, and slowly press out to reveal your glorious Pedro Puck.

For subsequent pulls, drop the puck back in its original jar. Your can even reuse your filters: Flip the filter disks gunk side out, put a little Everclear or IPA in the AP and press that into your mixing jar. If you check the filter it’s pretty clean now. I added some more Everclear to cover the powder, stirred and let rest for a few hours.



I did three pulls this way. Each into their own collection jars for batch1 and batch2. On the fourth pull I combined the two plant masses and did a fourth pull combined. The remaining juice was split between. Jars 1 and 2.

After all pulls were completed the collection jars were filtered one last time with the AP, and, looking at the filter disks, it seemed to catch some remaining gunk.

Jars were spread over a few set of pans and fan dried. Took 5 hours, or less to dry for batch1, batch2 was set to evap overnight

Final product:
Batch1: 11g
Batch2: 20g

Texture was mixed from flaky/crystaline, to gooey around the edges of the plates.

Are these final weights normal? The weight of the second batch doesn’t make much sense at 20g. I’m mean I only started with 54g powder. Perhaps there is still water trapped in the final extract. Perhaps I could dehydrate on a low heat setting. Any suggestions or additional post processing steps? It sounds like others didn’t have much success when attempting a final water extraction.

As far as ingestion, I’m debating on what to do. The extract is some what gooey and probably pretty hard to swallow.

For dosage, is the 11g Bridgesii extract sufficient considering it came from 50g powder, or should I add a few grams from batch2?

The water will continuously pull more "stuff" that isn't the wanted "stuff". More water the more "stuff" if you can squeeze it out via Alcohol that is (else it swells and holds the water in).

I have found that you get from 8-20 grams of "stuff" from 100 grams of powder often and yet it always contains the amount of "wanted" stuff either way. It's just more dense/potent in ratio of "wanted" stuff. As long as you did well at washing it you will get the good stuff either with a lot of water or a little.

It's touchy about 75% to 80% from what I have found, 80%+ pulls less than 20g from 100g basically.

Now in your case with a lot of water and forcing Alcohol through that, your going to pull a lot of extra stuff (mainly pectin, which is why I recommend pectinase to break it down and pull out every drop of "good" stuff. Yet you still get a lot of extra stuff if you use more water than just 10-15% of the Alcohol you use.

Also you really only have to soak 3 days in the 80% alcohol or whatever water/alcohol ratio you use. You then can filter it with 100% Alcohol just fine to wash out the "good" stuff. (ideally 100%, yet 95% is okay, you will be adding water, bloating a little, pulling more side stuff / pectin).

That is my conclusions from experiments. It's touchy, you get a lot of extra stuff or don't pull everything if you aren't giving it the good soak + breakdown 3+ days + vinegar in that water FYI too for acidity.

I find that for 350g powder you can take 600ml of 99% ISO and add 150ml of water + 50ml vinager + 2-3tsp of pectinase, soak for 3 days, then filter it with about 800ml of ISO 99% or so. The powder takes up a little less space so you are soaking it well and breaking it down, then wash it however with pressure (buchner filter or the Aero press which I did try but tried with water only hence for me the thing just went boom spraying me and all the room!).

This seemed to get good results:

320g powder (600ml volume, 2.5 cups)
2-3tsp pectinase (hard to find lab grade FYI)
600ml 99% ISO
150ml distilled water
50ml vinegar

mix that up and wait 3 days stirring every 3-6 hours.

then filter it with the 800-1500ml ISO (you get about 1500ml out

If you decrease that water value to 100ml you get less than 20g per 100g powder output.

YMMV but that seems to be the trend I have found.

Heat may be interesting at 50C (low heat, very low) for some / all of the soak time but seems not necessary, that acidic water + pectinase and ISO will strip out everything "good" without the extra 12g or so per 100g of powder you can get.

Think of it like you usually get 1g of pure (mostly) "good" stuff per 100g. So 10g of full spectrum extract is great and matches what you see out there on dosages for a full spectrum san pedro extract. 3-5 grams is good dosage then, else with 20g per 100g you have to eat 6-10 grams so it starts getting more than a "tea" mixture would like (unless you love a lot of strong tea!)

@orbit: So given I ended up with a total of 31g of stuff from 104g of powder, which seems overly high, what would your recommendation be to get it down to a more reasonable 10g, of most ‘good stuff’?

A) soak with acidic water and filter gunk?
B) soak with 99% ipa, and filter
C) …

🙏🏼

use 99% Alcohol on the wash and on first soak only up to 20% water with the alcohol. That is the main key, avoid water besides the minimal needed amount. Additional water just brings out extra stuff or holds it in too from the powder soaking it back up. (you can experiment and see the more water you use, the larger the mass of powder becomes in the alcohol).