The aluminum will react with the acid, so if you’re using acetic acid, you’ll get aluminum acetate in your solution (and you’ll create pits and corrosion on the inside surface of your pot). I don’t think the yield will be effected.

dont use aluminum..your health is important..the cost you save on buying a stainless steel pot is not worth poisoning yourself.

ok i see; thanks man, i'll keep that in mind

I'm having trouble understanding. Why does the tek call fora an addition of NaOH to initially precipitate, then call for an acidification followed by another precipitation with NaOH? Why not just one precipitation? Can CaOH be used instead of NaOH? Or sodium carbonate?

Would you suggest a particular method if one wanted a tincture instead of freebase? A tincture that wouldn't have to be kept in the fridge.

tictures from plants containing alks are usually made using a 70-75% etanol solution in water imo you could let your powdered caapi into it and let it extract,or use a percolatormany times but i think you could put the solution into a jar with caapi and let it extract for some days,10-20 days if you're not hurry

The caapi brew initially contains a cloudy mix of alkaloid salts and plant fibers and particles.

The first basification pulls all of the alkaloids out of solution. The liquid is removed and you’re left with alkaloids plus insoluble plant material. So how do we separate the alkaloids from the insoluble plant material? We put the alkaloids back into solution.

One way to do this is to acidify the alkaloids. Another way is to add a solvent, such as IPA (but I’m not sure if all of the alkaloids are completely soluble in IPA, and there may be some inert plant material that is soluble). Once the alkaloids are back in solution, we can separate them from the insoluble material.

If you don’t mind the vinegar flavor/smell of acetates, then I suppose you could boil down the alkaloid solution to a small volume, maybe add a bit of ethanol as a preservative, and you’d have a nice tincture ready to go.

The second basification is to get the alkaloids back to freebase form (and to further purify by removing any remaining soluble impurities). I use NaOH because it’s an excellent base, and sodium salts of acids (such as sodium acetate) are generally very soluble. Calcium hydroxide isn’t a good choice because of solubility of calcium salts (I think). Sodium carbonate might work – only one way to know for sure: try it!

The nice thing about this TEK is that it uses only water as a solvent and yields a very clean product. If you do an alcohol extraction of caapi, you’ll probably not get as good a yield (caapi soaking in alcohol is not going to release its alkaloids as readily as caapi in boiling acidified water). Also, alcohol will pull out plant oils, resins, chlorophyll, gums, tars – any and all lipids that are soluble in alcohol. You will not get a very pure product.

Thanks for all that!

I finally bought some rue (P. harmala) and did an extraction using the same method as I did for caapi.

I started with 50g of whole seeds. I did not grind them. I did four 30-minute boils. Each boil used 500ml water acidified with a bit of vinegar (I didn’t measure – maybe 25ml).

I basified, removed what soluble impurities I could (the alkaloids don’t settle quite as cleanly with rue as they do with caapi). I then acidified, and there was a huge amount of black sediment, so I had to do several washes with acidified water.

I then freebased the alkaloids. I could have done a Manske at this point to remove vasicine and vasicinone, but from what I’ve read, these alkaloids are not harmful (unless you’re a pregnant woman) and may even be beneficial. Anyhow, I dried the alkaloids and got an impressive 3.59g of clean product – a yield of 7.2%

I’m going to do a Manske on 1g of these alkaloids, just to see what kind of yield I can get, to see if it will clean the product further, etc.

To summarize, this extraction method works very well for rue, yields a very clean product, and gives one the option of including a selective extraction step (Manske).

Its very nice to hear you tried this with Syrian Rue.Cant wait for the results of the manske on that 1g.
Now i was just wondering ,could you post maybe a picture of your final yield 3.59g ? or at least describe the color.
If the manske still makes for a good yield then it means that your tek can save all the nexians like a good 12-24 hours.
Harmala teks are just so long in general,i hope you have good results.

I like your approach except that I don't like being a long time on the stove if extracting with A/B after. Makes the whole process very time/energy consuming.
Just me, but I like more to do a IPA/Ethanol pull of the seeds/bark before basifying anything.

That being said, I start extracting caapi alcaloids like you did from previous caapi brew that I felt wouldn't use in the nearest future and start basifying this.
Glycerin tincture of caapi alcaloids is neat for microdosing.
Black caapi is a strain I nver came across yet.
I'm on a red caapi IPA extraction right now.

I'm still waiting on some info regarding boil time on caapi.

If it is that fast to get the majority of alkaloids out of the vine, this would cut down the time it takes to make ayahuasca.

That's my next experiment!

(Maybe later this week, or next week.)

Well, I finished the Manske, and the results were a bit disappointing (and strange).

When I basified the crystals formed during the Manske, I ended up with a precipitate that was darker brown than the product I started with. Strange. So I acidified and there was some reddish-brown precipitate. I have no idea where it came from. Anyhow, the 2nd post-Manske basification yielded a nice product, but the yield was low:

I started with 1.00g, and ended up with 0.60g – a loss of 40%. This is the first time I’ve done a Manske, so maybe my technique isn’t very good yet. 40% seems like a big loss. My understanding is that vasicine and vasicinone are present in trace amounts (a few percent at most?), so it hardly seems worth it to remove them if nearly 40% of the harmine and harmaline are lost in the process.

I’m wondering what a typical Manske yield is? My original yield was 7.17%. If we assume 40% loss due to Manske, then I’d have a yield of 4.3%. Is that a good yield for a rue extraction?

Finally, the attached photo shows the Manske-extracted alkaloids on the left, and the original full-spectrum alkaloids on the right. The Manske cleaned it up a bit, but not much.

DEFINITELY looking forward to this one!

Wow your full spectrum products are very nice looking.

As for the yield after the manske,4.3% is a very good yield to my knowledge.Maybe if you can or have the time ;you could bioassay a small ammount of the manske product and
give us a little report on that?

Thanks

I tried both products as soon as they were dry.

To test them, I take 25mg sublingually. They both produced the mild relaxation and calm feelings that I get from a sublingual dose of harmala alkaloids. (Haven’t tried them with anything else yet.)

Here’s an interesting thing I’ve discovered: When I take the caapi extracted alkaloids sublingually, after about 15 minutes the alkaloids are completely absorbed and there is no residual taste. When I take the rue alkaloids sublingually, I get the same results – no residue left after 15 minutes or so – but there is a pronounced and lingering bitter taste. The bitterness stays around for quite a while. I’m wondering if that persistent bitter taste is caused by harmaline?

(Of course, all of the alkaloids are bitter when tasted, but the bitterness isn’t noticed when they are administered sublingually. The caapi seems to be absorbed so well that nothing remains – not even the bitterness.)

I'll get some pics up later perhaps, I did the tek (eeeeasy) and got about 2.25g from 100g of red caapi. The interesting thing was that, after I got the lye out, I saved the rinse-water (which was still becoming brownish, even after the alks seemed to settle) and after about a week it COMPLETELY settled leaving some alks in the bottom, with the water on top being totally clear. Will post!

One thing I've been thinking about trying, given how great I've found freebase harmalas to be, would be a tek based on powdered caapi that was even more similar to an A/B and used the A/Bness to break down the plant material rather than the boils.

Sounds like you also got a good yield. I wonder if the yields we’re seeing are typical? The literature reports caapi alkaloid content at 0.1 – 0.8% or so.

When allowing your rinses to settle, you should have crystal clear solution after only 12 hours. No need to let it settle for a week!

I wonder if this pictorial could be adapted for a full-spectrum Iboga extract... :idea: