I have made 3 attempts at Cielo and didn't get crystals or goo, but I think I recovered M from the extract solution. The first two runs I skipped the fridge rest. All 3 times I got clouding when adding CA and the EA turned a much lighter olive green color. Then after about 24 hours the solution was clear again and no signs of crystals or goo.

On my last attempt I did the fridge rest and carefully decanted leaving behind the water and some EA. I left the jars at room temp for about 12 hours before adding CA. The solution turned very cloudy and I really thought I had nailed it this time with the fridge rest. The next day I checked the jars and no signs of crystals but what looks like a water/goo layer on the bottom. Those jars are still resting.

My first two attempts were with 100g and 50g of cactus powder. I'm sure the cactus is not "bunk" as I grew it myself and the cuts were cured for several months. These same cuts make a pretty potent tea, especially when cured. I added more CA but it just fell to the bottom of the jar. I was about to toss out the solution and consider it a failed experiment, but then decided to try to salt out the M with vinegar like in 69rons limo tek. So, I added 50ml vinegar and shook the jars several times. The EA and vinegar layers separated readily. I continued to shake the jars for about 5 minutes doing ~50ml vinegar at a time, and separated with a sep funnel and filtered the vinegar through a coffee filter. Then I reduced the 200ml of vinegar on a double boiler down to less than 100 ml and finished drying in a dehydrator overnight. From 150g cactus powder I ended up with 9.6g of what looks like very pure Mesc. I'm just wondering what others thoughts are on this alternate method of salting. I tasted it and it tasted exactly like Mesc, but also very sour. It had a pungent vinegar smell, So after scraping it up I spread it out over some filter paper and dried in the dehydrator at 110F for another 5 hours. This shed about .3g of weight and really knocked back the vinegar smell. The material certainly looks and tastes like Mesc. I sampled 100mg a few days ago and found it pleasant, but barely threshold. The next day I sampled 200mg and it was barely noticeable. I didn't take any yesterday and I'm going to try 300mg today.

My goal is still to get the tek to work as intended and get citrate crystals to precipitate out. I believe the coffee filters I've been using are maybe too thin so on my next attempt I will try with thicker filter paper.

Vinegar residue notwithstanding, this description alongside the picture of the crystals* and the reportedly weak effects suggests to me you're dealing with a large excess of citric acid. If your filter really was that poor there's a likelihood of calcium salts being in there, perhaps, if also the EA came out of the pulls a bit cloudy. FWIW, given the large excess of citric acid that you apparently used it would have been equally successful to have pulled the mesc citrate out using distilled water alone.

Either way, 6.4% would be a fairly exceptional yield although it's worth bearing mind that 100mg of monomescaline citrate makes for a very mild dosage level. What amount of cactus did you usually consume for potent effects in a brew, and how does this compare with the amount of fresh cactus you used for producing the 150g of dry powder?


*Visual appearance is, of course, largely useless as an analytical tool here except for how your crystals have a form much more reminiscent of citric acid than the sparkling needles we are accustomed to seeing with CIELO:
https://wiki.dmt-nexus.m...906809_copy_800x600.jpg
https://wiki.dmt-nexus.m...00x800_copy_800x600.jpg


Citric acid for comparison:
https://cpimg.tistatic.c...Monohydrate-Crystal.jpg
Edit: sorry, embedding of image links doesn't appear to be working, but you can easily check the CIELO wiki page to see what I mean, especially since it appears worth your while to go through the technique once more really carefully to see whether what you did in your extraction diverges in any further significant ways from the TEK as written.

I think you're right.

I took 250mg about 3 hours ago it seems there are just no effects. Now i'm wondering if what I experienced the other day with 100mg was just placebo. As far as how much cactus do I use with tea...i couldn't really answer that because I've never weighed the cactus material going into tea making. But if I take 3-5g of evaporated tea I get midium level effects. I've juiced 150g of fresh material (uncured) in the vitamix and drank whole, very strong experience. Cactus is generally 95% water weight so that would be ~7.5g dry comparison.

The EA was clear before salting with CA, not cloudy at all. I still have a jar with 50g of extract solution that hasn't precipitated. do you think I could pull it out with just distilled water?