This was tried already before by Loveall and others and drying your ethyl acetate with magnesium sulphate for example will interfere with crystallization and result in lower yields. One possibility is that the mescaline citrate is crystallized as monohydrate and it needs some of the extra water for proper crystallization, so a fully dried solvent isnt wanted in this case. I haven´t tested this in a side by side experimentally (would of course be interested if anybody does) but I have extracted and crystallized mescaline several times now with the Ethyl acetate containing water within these acceptable ranges and it works perfectly. As they say, don´t change a winning team



Orion, I didnt pour away/filter the ice because I didn´t want to remove too much water that potentially would interfere with crystallization later on. Also I am not sure of the solubility of mescaline in Ethyl Acetate at freezing temperatures so I was worried that some of the mescaline might have separated from ethyl acetate and be filtered away. One could of course test this easily experimentally but I didn´t want to do a side by side, I just wanted to make sure I got all my mescaline in a short time, so I figured that would be the easiest way.

And yeah I think you could convert your HCl to citrate that way. If you add just enough water for the HCl to dissolve, when you add lime it will already be quite dry so you can pull with ethyl acetate straight away without having to dry it. And a bit of extra water shouldn´t be a problem in any case as mentioned above, specially if you do a fridge (or quick freeze and thaw) step to get the water content to that acceptable range.

Wouldn't the lack of water in the toluene cause an issue though ? If my understanding is correct, the small amount of water in ethyl acetate is actually helpful.

About the citric acid, would it be best to use the monohydrate form rather than anhydrous ?

Toluene and benzoic acid work great without any water. Mescaline benzoate xtalizes very well in toluene. As a side note - mescaline benzoate did not xtalize from EA 🤷‍♂️

From my experience I highly recommend monohydrate citric acid instead of anhydrous, the anhydrous did not dissolve well at all even with a lot of stirring and even ultrasonic bath. Not sure why that happened if the EA after pulling has some water content, and if others were able to make it work but for me it only worked well using anhydrous citric acid if i predissolved it in ethyl acetate that I added enough water to, and then added that to the ethyl acetate pulls

So it works great for crystallization, but does it also behave the same with the cactus paste? Like is there the same performance when I add the foluene to my paste like Ethyl Acetate or was this never tested, just if I could get crystals when already starting with pure mescaline?

I would try that benzoic / toluene way maybe in future, but first will need to wait for my poor cactus to suffer a little more in darkness.

So when trying to dissolve anhydrous citric acid in ethyl acetate, I added 11.1g anhydrous citric acid in 250ml ethyl acetate. It did not dissolve much at all, even after overnight stirring in a magnetic stirrer and some time in the ultrasonic bath.

So I decided to add water in small amounts until it all dissolved. It took about 5ml water for the citric acid to dissolve completely.

Am I right in thinking that no matter which form of citric acid is used, the same compound will form, not a different one with a different level of hydration and possibly a different potency ?

Just making sure as I do have both anhydrous citric acid and the monohydrate.

Endlessness recommended the monohydrate because it dissolves more easily so you can choose that.

Yeah I ended up finding out that my citric acid is Anhydrous . I'll just get a different brand.

Btw Loveall, _Trip_ and others, did you ever by any chance check the solubility of mesc citrate in ethanol, isopropanol, water and other solvents?