If smell tends to leak, you are not sealing the extrac. This could alow moisture into the extract and be the reason you are having issues here, or reddit, and on youtube. If that is also your xtalization vessel, your xtals could turn to goo overtime as moisture is absorbed from the atmosphere. I believe you have been told this repeatedly?

I'm assuming you are the guy with aluminum foil over beakers? That could be your issue. The TEK asked for sealed containers, specifically mason jars that can hold a vacuum.

I think the brine wash is likely to work. Not as lazy as a proper fridge rest in my opinion.

I like your ethylene gas idea by the way. Interested in your results once you figure out the TEK. I think not hermetically sealing your containers is giving you unnecessary headaches and causing you delays + extra work.

Yea I don't have any seal-able containers. You did mention that it needs to be sealed to prevent getting moisture from the air...

The salt brine does skip the need for me to do the fridge rest. The cielo tek is pretty easy for most but I've had issues even when doing fridge rest but maybe it was the lack of a seal container IDK. Also instead of an extra day fridge rest I can reduce it by a day.

I'll see if I can get an old olive or other container for it to be sealed to prevent other issues but mason jars besides not being readily available are not the cheapest here.

Also my balance isn't the best since it's pretty beat up so need to wait for larger cuttings to more accurately measure the results.

With some exprience over the years and dozens of cacti extractions, I have become convinced that the fridge rest is not needed if the paste is not too wet to begin with. I now believe that the ideal paste has just enough water to moisten the cactus powder with no dry spots. Any water beyond that, is not usefull and seems to be the cause of some beginners get5ing goo. Side note: it also seems helpfull to let the paste air out for a few minutes to allow the ammonia smell to dissipate.

There are several kind of paste after mixing well

- Too dry: some dry powder remains.
- Ideal: just enough water is added so all the cactus powder is wet. Consistensy is similar to play-doh. Fridge rest and decant is not needed, but it eont hurt.
- Accceptable: More water than ideal, but the paste can still hold its shape. Consistency is similar to moist mash potatoes. Fridge rest reccomended to avoid goo.
- Too wet: Paste is so wet it begins to not offer resistance to holding its shape (soggy mashed potatoe consitency or beyond). Fridge rest may not be enough to avoid goo. More extensive drying with a freezer or sodium carbonate step may be required (however, excessive drying can cause other issues such as sticky powder, hard goo, or no clouding reaction). If goo is obtained, 99% IPA re-X will recover xtaline product.

With an ideal paste, and by not undersalting (at least 5g citric acid per quart of extract), the process is very robust in my opinion.

I'm planning on updating the TEK soon. In particular, making it clear that the Ideal paste is preffered instead of the Acceptable one. Wondering if anyone has any feedback or different/alternative observations before that.

I've been wanting to mix together an example of the ideal paste consistency using standard kitchen goods like flour, sugar, salt, water, etc. That way CIELO newbies can first mix together the example of the ideal paste, then ensure their CIELO paste matches. This could go a long way towards troubleshooting CIELO extractions.

I'm not a baker or chef, so I don't know where to start. Any ideas?

IDK, but flour makes sense.

I invested in a 550g grain mill ($70). The resulting cactus powder is much easier to make (vs my small coffee grinder) and resembles flour in texture.

I am very happy that I don't need the fridge rest by being lazy and only adding the water needed to wet all the powder and no more. Also, I've moved on from the pretty needles, and use a magnetic stirrer like you reccomend. The resulting product is a dense fine powder that is completely done crashing in less than an hour (backlogjt test is a nice confirmation) and is easy to pack into capsules (image below). For some reason there is no product sticking to the walls. only a tiny bit ground into the bottom of the jar by the magnetic stirrer (second image). I just wash this with the wate used in the next extraction.

To neutralize the solvent for re-use I also use the magnetic stirrer with sodium carbonate. Does a great job at neutralizing quickly.

I'm so lazy and.... lol

My observations is that for right consistency of the paste it's important to mix lime with water before adding it to cactus powder.


Could you please share a link or picture of it? Small coffee grinder capabilities are quite limiting

Interesting, I have no found no difference if mixing the lime with cactus powder or water first. I do not like adding lime to wet paste, it is hard to make the lime uniform this way.

Here is a link to the grain mill.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09ZPGRSZ9

It makes a good cactus powder in only 30s. Longer time than that can heat up the Lowder to the point of beginibg to toast it and make it a little sticky. The sifter that comes with it is great to filter out anything that needs regrinding.

Really? That's strange, because in my case, adding lime water to cactus powder makes easy-to-work paste, but adding water to mix of cactus and lime makes paste which is quite gummy, much more slimy and harder to mix. You are much more experienced in this topic, so maybe something different was the cause.

Thank you for the link.

Was was your % lime? I use 15% lime or above per cactus unit and it gives me good paste consistency mixed either way.

It is 20-25% of lime per cactus powder, in weight.
Maybe some properties of powder make the difference.
I tried to make paste few times and was wondering how it is possible that I can not reach the right consistency you describe in the TEK. Switching to pre-mixing lime with water solved this issue.

It makes sense to me on an intuitive level at least that having the lime pre-mixed with the water makes it ready to receive the cactus and it can get to work on the slime straight away. When both powders are dry, the slime can get a head start on the lime, as it were, and the slime gets to soak up more water before the lime gets a chance to dissolve properly.

I'll make a better description if necessary, once I've had some sleep!

Interesting that pre-mixing was more robust for you. It could be a difference in starting material (?). Bellow are pictures of making paste mixing the lime and cactus first and slowly adding watwer.

Have you tried the TEK? Interesred in how it went for you - I consider you an expert to learn from 🙏

Umm... yes this makes sense. Perhaps extra goopy cactus benefits from making the milk of lime first, while not so goopy cactus powder doesn't care. Or maybe the grind mattere. Finer grind may be more robust to the order of operations.

Both are good points that summarise underlying aspects of my thinking very nicely - thanks, Loveall

Dfz is right, it seems to me that milk of lime doesn't allow mucilage to develop slime in same manner as plain water do.

I would say that grinding is not an important factor, my powder was very fine, like flour.

Your picture shows structure which I can achieve only by mixing cactus with milk of lime.
I believe that this shows that water/mucilage mix is variable, so amount of water extracted by EA could be also variable. Nothing new here, we all know that not all cacti are the same.



Thank you I still have not, I only had toluene so extracted with it (works very well), but will try EA in few months, I have finally all the materials needed.

OK.

I have updated the TEK with more paste images. Ideal paste (middle row) does not need a fridge rest to avoid goo.

Funny enough regarding going for a dryer paste is exactly what I made when I extracted that one big cactus in autumn. I wanted to make a detailed post about potential benefits with the pictures I created, but then just abandoned this

So will also add a little to the "dryer than usual" thing.

That whole thing arose from me because of 1 certain observation:


If I throw 500 ml of EA on my cactus power, I will only recover like 250 ml at the end ...


So the paste is swelling with every single pull and if you closely take track of the ml that goes in every pull and come out, I always saw I only recover ~50 %.

This has 2 bad consequences in my opinion:

1. In the CIELO Tek it is written you should not wait toooo long, because the paste congeals over time. But I am pretty sure that it not congeals over time, but "over pulls" = the more EA is also left inside the paste, the more it will become sludge and unable to extract from it.

Constant amount water + constant amount cacti powder + increasing amount of EA = more and more goo

2. If you throw 100 % of EA onto the cactus, it will take up X amount of Mescaline from the powder. But if you can only recover 50 %, you will only get X/2 Mescaline out with that pull. So the next EA pull will also get some new mescaline, but also need to pull out the old EA from first pull, where we still have 50 % left. But if you recover only 50 % again, then you just get 25 % from that back. Etc. etc., so by not getting as much EA out after every pull, in theory the pulls would be less efficient.

Of course that makes no problem, as the TEK is still flawless and the yields reported are just so high, any POTENTIAL lower efficiency does not really matter.



But I just wanted to make a small variation, which might make life easier for me. Because of that I had this in mind:



I was thinking:
1. Water is very closely bound with the cactus powder, I think it will not release from it anyways.
2. IF it would release, then the EA is anyways already saturated by 2 % with water instantly upon mixing, so it would anyways just go to the bottom and be easily decanted
3. Even IF it would make it into the EA itself, it would be lost upon fridge decant.

So I thought this could IN THEORY make pulls more effective, if I squeeze all the EA out after every pull, so I get nearly 90 % of EA out every time I do a pull and throw some new EA onto it. While it seems that there is no necessity for it to get all the Mescaline, just as I said IN THEORY it would either make me get all the Mescaline with less pulls or vice versa with the same amount of pulls I get more Mescaline - as a pull with fresh solvent will have a stronger effect, than some which is back-diluted with already partially saturated old solvent.

A nice side effect is:

As indeed the congealing is caused by sequential build-up on EA inside the paste, there is no risk ever (!) that the paste will congeal. I will show with the pictures that the paste will always remain rock solid - so yeah also in my case it is not a "paste" anymore, it is actually just more powder. And while the efficiency thing is just IN THEORY, the fact that it never congeals might indeed be a convenience bonus


So in order to be able to squeeze your paste (let's call it more powder in my case) the paste has to be much drier. Because a regular paste will potentially go through any kind of cloth or similar that you use. By making it as dry as possible, you can squeeze your paste (AKA powder) like hell as I will show in pictures later.



1.) Making the Paste --> Powder

There was the discussion with Loveall and doubledog about adding lime first or adding lime + cacti to water together. In my case I will make the paste as dry as possible. In my idea the water is ONLY needed to make contact between cacti powder + Ca(OH)2 and everything that overshoots this purpose is unnecessary. Therefore I am creating my cactus paste with the absolute minimum amount of water. Because of this, adding the lime first to water will make a risk. Because you would start with a too low amount and afterwards add more water incrementially, to never overshoot. But if you have all your lime already inside the water and you added let's say 50 % of your cacti powder, then it is too dry and you need more water, it means you will add only pure water and the sequential cacti powders might not have 100% contact with the Ca(OH)2, as this was already spent in the beginning.

Because of that I mix both cacti powder and Ca(OH)2 to a totally homogeneous powder. Then take SOME water and start mixing the powder into. With EVERY SPOON you get a perfect ratio of cacti + Ca(OH)2, so if you have too less water, add a little of the powder, add a little more water on that area, you will never have the risk of not having 100 % guaranteed contact between cacti + Ca(OH)2, even if you go on the very low water end.

... not sure if that was clearly explained, it sounds a little stupid to me. But yeah this way I think you are more safe that going with minimum water you still have 100 % guaranteed freebasing.

Twilight Person wrote about using a kitchen mixer for his paste / EA pulls. A thing like this will always mix more efficient than any hand / spoon can do. So going low on the water means doing exactly this mixing step that I describe above with a kitchen mixer is the way to go, as it will even mix VERY LOW WATER setups.

2. Pulling

That is just performed as usual. Maybe I even used a little more EA to make less pulls, but with "more strength" also due to squeezing in between.

3. Squeezing

Now this is just the whole goal I wanted to have with all of those requirements. Simply mix with EA as usual and now you have VERY dry paste / Powder + EA inside. Now simply use the following:

1. Place a pot somewhere
2. Put a sieve on top
3. Put a cloth onto the sieve
4. Transfer Powder/EA into that and let some EA already flow down
5. Now wrap that cloth so you have the EA/Powder mix inside and squeeze the cloth LIKE HELL
6. Observe LOTS of EA run through, that otherwise would be bound to the plant matrix
7. If you remove the powder from your cloth, it will be ROCK SOLID and even form a SOLID BALL. This means this ball is nearly free of EA and the next pull will be at a higher efficiency

Also sideeffect:

This ball will NEVER congeal. You will have exactly the same rock-solid consistency EVERY TIME after a pull, so in theory you can do 1000 pulls or leave your pulls for 1 week every time, never any congeal will happen.

So while I dont see how that REALLY has any benefit (even the potentially more efficient pulls are just threory, as "normal" pulls also do the job obviously), but for me it seems more convenient, so if I buy a second cactus I would only do it this way.



Now here are some pictures which I did not upload back then.
Just as a last note, you could dry the powder even more in an oven, but that is a waste of time. The paste just would need to be as dry as needed to NOT spill over when doing the squeeze thing. So going with less than 100 ml per 100 g cactus is probably just a waste of time and makes the initial Ca(OH)2-mix-step harder.
Interestingly the powder will loose also some water with every pull. So at the end a cactus-Ca(OH)2-water-powder-mix will not be 100 + 100 = 200 g, but more like 120-150 g, so 50+ ml of water are also drawn away by sequential EA pulls.

Pictures:

I've been a big believer in a few variations, anecdotally I've had good results using a blender, less water,hot EA pulls and squeezing the paste.

I think squeezing the paste is an issue if it is too wet. Drier paste can be squeezed, I agree.

My issue with the drier paste is that fine particles of cactus/lime end up in the EA. They clog the coffe filter and need a fridge rest to collect the finer solids that pass trough the filter.

BUT, I din't blend the drier paste. Perhaps that is my problem...

BW: what cactus/lime ratio are you using? Is it 1:0.25?

A drier paste without suspended particles would be ideal for EA recovery and salting with confidence that water in the EA will not cause goo.

Incidentally, the % water in the EA is more complex than pure EA. I think there is a non-linear feedback loop:

- Wet paste moves more water and more plant compounds into the EA.
- The additonal plant compounds help the EA absorb more water (non-linear effect)
- After a fridge rest, the final % water could be higher than the theoretical 2.5% for pure EA/water. This is because the additonal plant stuff could be enhancing miscibility.
- This could explain why some people NEED a freezer rest. This is a more aggressive water removal technique. They need it because their paste is too wet to begin with, causing extra plant stuff to be in the EA, which in turn make the fridge rest less effective.
- It also explains why at the beginning of the TEK development people where getting goo without the fridge rest (wet paste but not as wet as those neededing a freezer rest) and others were not (ideal paste, dier than other users). We settled with adding the fridge rest since there is no downside and mase the process more robust. BuT by focusing on the paste, the fridge rest could be removed.


Bottom line, if a blender avoids loose small particles in the drier paste, this is a huge improvement to the tek and can stamdarize the low water approach. I will try this next.

I wonder if a blender would also help doubledog order of operations. Withe enough mixing there should be an equilibrium independent of how the ingredients are added I think.

Yes that was then the whole origin of going low-water when I first did it. Funny enough the situation was very hillarious:

I did it with a friend and he asked: Can't we just squeeze it out???

I said: No better not - maybe some water might spill over and besides it also works well this way.

He said: Man let's try it!

I said: oook ... well ... ok.

And voila - if you use a cloth then there are (at least no visible) particles spilling over into the EA. To me it looks totally clear. I still did the filtering through coffee filter, but when squeezing through cloth it is already just liquid. Just note that when you have a LOT of powder, maybe its smarter to make 50 % squeeze + 50 % squeeze, like when handling 100 g cacti powder do it in 2x or maybe even 3x. But of course it takes no time, but you might get less EA back if your ball is huge and therefore pressure applied not too high per increased ball weight.




Yes just using your / rons original recipe. Worked good all trials!




Thats an interesting idea, I dont know much about cacti, but as they probably contain a lot of stuff with a magic affinity to water, some of that stuff could indeed make its way over and cause some disruption this way!



I also have some funny pictures of me mixing that powder etc. But dont want to post as I dont know how to make my hand mixer more incognito. But I think no mixing of any human can surpass what a cheap kitchen hand mixer can do in short minutes, so from now on will always use it for preparing the freebase step.

As long as the whole dry paste looks homogeneous and you added lime AND cacti at the same time (pre-mixed) you probably can be sure that it also freebased 100 %, even if it is not dough-like.






Now that is also interesting. I used 100 °C Limonene and Heptane, but as I never managed to create Mescaline Benzoate directly from a pull, their usage is pointless. [Also anyways its too much work to smoke all that, so Mescaline Benzoate is scrapped for me now.]

But for EA of course I thought: "aaaaah it works well at room temperature, so not mandatory to heat." ... but of course totally everything works better when hot.

Now normally we are always afraid to get more contaminants / destroy Alkaloids / even enable side reactions etc. etc. when heating.

But: Isn't this Citric Acid step a magical tool to perfectly separate everything from the Mescaline Citrate with basically 100 % efficiency? It seems that from everything that exists in total inside of an EA pull nothing is co-precipitating.
So a consequence would be: Even if we have more of whatever-comes-with-the-mescaline then even MORE of that would be no problem, as it will also not co-precipitate.

So maybe heating EA is quite smart, because - yes, you technically dont need it - it will speed up stuff and again make pulls more efficient AKA do the same job with less pulls.

So I guess your take to heate a little is pretty good and I guess then it also does not produce any unwanted side effects, if you are doing it on a regular base? Maybe could try this next time I buy one:

1. create mostly dry paste

2. put in a pot, fill up with a little more EA than needed AKA immerse everything with EA and have like 1-2 mm EA layer above everything.

3. Close pot and heat for 15 min at like 50-60 °C (will smell terrible inside whole room)

4. Put my setup with sieve and cloth on top, decant into this, form the cloth ball and squeeze like hell.

5. Repeat 2x.

That could be even more lazy, because you dont need to do anything except from time to time do a squeeze, while inbetween it is just simmering and thus getting some "micro mixing" thanks to thermodynamics. Plus no congeal, because the baseline EA inside your paste is always reduced to near 0 between every pull.