You can also dissolve the hard wax in a small amount of hot water, then evaporate in a shallow dish/tray and see what you get.

What may have happened is that somehow your xtalization jar had too much water. It should all work out next time with a good fridge rest, a careful decant, and xtalizing at a warmer temperature than the rest temperature. Also, your paste looks ok (it should have worked), but it could be a little drier which may give you a bigger buffer for error.

I think the decanting step has most likely been the culprit here, so I hope getting some better tools for this will pay out. Next time I will prepare the paste with a little less water.

Thank you for the tip, Loveall . I really appreciate your guidance. I followed your suggestion and dissolved the wax by adding hot water (after pouring off the EA). It dissolved quite quickly. I now allow the water to evaporate in a shallow dish, using a fan to speed things up.

Cool, hopefully you get a semi xtaline product. May be a little resinous and not as strong as pure xtals, but should be potent.

This morning I scraped what was in the dish with a razor and ended up with about 410mg of raisin. It does taste very bitter, but I suspect that it's not very pure as it's way more than I expected. I am still happy with the result and look forward to the next extraction .

Cheelin turned goo into xtals and got was 65% of the original goo mass as xtaline product.

Thank you, this is giving me a rough idea about the potency of my product. I experiment with different doses of Monomescaline Citrate at the moment (working my way up), so I am concidering to turn my wax into crystals too eventually. That would allow me to know how much I am actually working with.

Made a TEK update. Someone trying the TEK for the first time got a water layer in the extraction jar. Cause seems to be squeezing hard on the French press (which the TEK mentions not to do). Paste being too wet may be a contributing factor.

Added how to recover in the FAQ section.

Another TEK update:

There are now reports of up to 8.6% yields. That is from the skin of a clone gifted by a shaman in the 90s (not Ogun, just a gift to someone at that time).

So I've updated the TEK with a warning. The max yield for 5g of citric acid is 10%. Anything near that approaches the salting limit, so for extremely high yield the ethyl acetate extract should be double checked with a pH meter. Also, we mention 1 teaspoon of citric acid and there is an error in that (could be as little as 4g depending on how full the teaspoon is, clipping the 8% yield if the citric acid is monohydrate).

Edit: Note that this is ~7x the typical yield. Extraction and dose measurement for cacti seems like a good harm reduction practice, so people get what they expect.

Just a quick update on my progress. I decided to cover my wax with fresh EA, hoping to end up with crystals. After 3 days it turned into powder, which I dried.

I also noticed that there was still a thin film in the dish I used for evaporation. I dissolved it with hot water, tilted the dish a bit so the fluid collected in one corner and waited for it to evaporate. This time I could recover more crystalline material (see pic attached).

All in all I got ~500mg crystals now.

Looking good Fridge,



Can confirm 8.2% citrate (5% HCL equivalent), from a bridgesii that was gifted to someone in the 90's by a village in South America that regularly practiced ceremonies. This person spent quite a long time living there before returning home with a couple cuttings and a heap of seeds.

15mg/ml was used for salting, the powder and base water were blended, slightly less water was used than required and hot EA was used for the pulls (consistency appeared perfect). Green skin only was used. All fresh materials used including the EA. Crystals where pure white, very bitter and washed at the end with fresh EA.

This was double any strain I have tested so far. In addition, the cutting was harvested fresh and not stressed or kept in the dark. I am currently seeking more information from the person I got it off, more on its history and their care for it (i.e fertilizer used etc). the strain was one of the thinnest strains of bridgesii I have every seen and quite dark green.

Looks good. A powdery product (very small xtals) makes sense. Longer xtals only form in very clean conditions. 2% yield is good.

Hope next time you get to avoid the extra cleanup work and enjoy the lazy spirit of the TEK

Thanks so much for the data point _Trip_, and congrats on finding that monster yield. Any plans on cloning it like crazy?

Have you noticed any benefits from using hot EA (e.g. fewer pulls needed to exhaust the powder)? Do you know the temperature you use?

I noticed my final yield increases a bit with hot EA. I just use a hot water bath, wear a mask though because it can start to boil easily. I think Cheelin reported only a 10% increase with warmer EA.

It would be good to see more reports on controlled experiments with the same cacti material and hot EA. The increases could be more than 10%.
I still do the same number of pulls but usually add a bit more EA than in the tek. I don't measure anymore just add until I see an 1/2 - 3/4 of an inch of EA above the paste in the French press maybe an inch and a half if using more material. It usually roughly works out to be the same maybe a bit more EA than what is in the tek (sometimes less). I'll try to take note and do more accurate measurements with warm EA next time. I should test each individual pull and see how many pulls are necessary with hot EA.

Even though I don't accurately measure the EA anymore I get consistent results from the same cacti material. Which I think is a testament to the tek itself. Dropping the microwave (from the early days of the tek) and blending I think have helped. The problem with blending is you need to use a little less water otherwise the paste is harder to work with. But this is just what has been working for me.

There is a lot of free spachanius around here so I might graft a few slab/ star grafts to thay and clone it like mad.

I was reading back through your older comments on base paste blending here, and wanted to ask for clarification. Do you mean just using less water and blending works well for you without microwaving afterward to fix the aeration/consistency problems that can happen in blending? I was thinking of trying it in a batch with my blendtec. I assume there's a lot of variation in aeration between blender models.

Yes, using less water and blending works well. Using less water seems to fix aeration issues and give a perfect consistency in paste. However, if you find you have added too much water and have gotten aeration you can do a couple quick bursts in the microwave to fix it and get the consistency you want.

I should clarify I don't recommend using the microwave. But it can be used to fix paste that has become too aerated and moist. (I personally have not had to do this in a long while as adjusting the water content seems to negate the need for use of a microwave).

I blend the base water first (using less water, approx 15-20% less) then I blend the cacti material. I seem to be getting good paste consistencies and better yields.

In addition, Loveall and many other contributors have worked very hard on this Tek, for anyone new to Cielo I recommend sticking with the Tek as it stands. For anyone that has excess material to experiment with, using a blender and less water maybe worth experimenting with (or maybe if you're just lazy like me).

And to throw a spanner in the works, I always press down hard on the French Press and have yet to have goo or water issues. However, I don't recommend doing this either as it is one less factor that could potentially mitigate goo results.

Apols for being too lazy (as a fellow minimalist ) to look back and check, but do you use a jug blender, a food processor or a hand-held blender?

A glass jug blender, have used a nutribullet blender in the past too, nutribullet works well (although these are plastic).

Excellent method, thanks Loveall, _Trip_ and everybody else who contributed to this.

I got (so far) 1.1% citrate yield from a mix of T. pachanoi and peruvianus from my garden. I know I can get more out because I only did half the pulls in this tek, since I only had expensive USP grade ethyl acetate. I will post back the final results once I wash and reuse the ethyl acetate from the first pulls.

I had a little issue with using anhydrous citric acid, which did not dissolve so well, and clumped up like a moist sugar at the bottom. Next time I will try to either hydrate the citric acid before, or pre-dissolve in a small amount of ethyl acetate and then use that

When some didn´t dissolve, I decanted the ethyl acetate away from it, which created a bit of an issue: As Loveall has already found out , if you don´t add enough citric acid, you get tri-mescaline citrate goo. So the day after adding the citric acid and decanting, I was sad to see just a bit of goo on the bottom, but after adding more citric acid and stirring, the whole thing turned into a snowglobe

Same with me... I press hard on the french press and haven't had goo or water issues. I also use about 40% more EA than the TEK recommends. Generally 6 pulls of 100+ grams of EA each pull, for 50 grams of cactus.

I get very consistent results, so when I start doing CIELO again (soon now), I'll test the hot EA method and report back.

So you's never get any water after in your EA after doing your pulls with a French press. I always get a little water at the bottom, and I don't even press down on the French press. It's not a big deal, I normally just decant the water out before salting, but I do find it interesting that a lot of people are saying they get no water after doing their pulls