A shaman who isn't me recently decided to freeze precipitate the crystals out of his naphtha, rather than evaporating. The shaman was using a STB extraction on about one third of a pound of MHRB. His base was Sodium Hydroxide. After 24+ hours in the freezer, the shaman's naphtha was like a yellow soup of spice and naphtha. He poured the soup out into a coffee filter, catching all of the floating spice (which was most of the total spice).

He was left with a bowl with some spice crystals and a bunch of spice in his coffee filter. He decided to evap the spice in the coffee filter. He put the bowl back into the freezer, upside down to try to separate the crystals from the naphtha. After about an hour, the crystals were still soaked.

The shaman ended up scraping off the wet crystals and evaporating them too. He got much higher quality spice than we would get with evaporation, but he was a little surprised by what happened. He thought that turning the bowl upside down in the freezer would separate the naphtha from the crystals.

Was the moisture on the crystals simply condensed water? Shouldn't most of the crystals stick to the side of the bowl? Did the shaman do anything horribly wrong from what you other shamans can tell?

Naphtha isn't going to evaporate ("dry" at freezer temperatures, like it will at room temperature. The shaman didn't do anything wrong from what SWIM can tell.

It sounds like your naptha was wet, possibly condensation. The proper way to freeze precip is to fav evap the solution down until cloudy. Then to prevent water contamination use alfoil over the top of the crystalising dish, secure with rubber bands this prevents any water from entering. After 3days in the freezer pour off all the naptha you can over a 10-20sec period, then put the bowl in the freezer, turning the bowl upside down on a slight angle with the foil still on it so the naptha will pool in one corner. If you don't do this you will lose spice to the shellite heating up and dissolving spice, or crystal formations ruined by condensation.