Dagger wrote:Nice post!
Under "Washing the harmalas", when you are pouring out the liquid to be discarded. What your pouring out looks like harmalas to me. What pH did you increase it to?
That would be somewhere between ph 11 and 12 according to my ph-papers. I used a few grams of sodium carbonate, I didn't weight how much.
Two extractions before this experimentation I used a bit of vinegar (thus also water) for the extraction and that yielded way more. It was done without the phosphoric acid (of course since we added the vinegar) but my guess is that IPA can't hold that much harmala salts. When I get back home I will try to disolve harmala freebase in IPA+phosphoric acid (at ph 3), see how far we come.
Also take notice that my camera tends to 'guess' the colors, in reality the liquid that was discarted looked was a little less (or lighter) yellow.
Kind regards,
The Traveler