Quote:mmmk but how would one do an A/B after he's already got crystals. is that a little excessive?
Maybe a bit 'excessive' in regard of the yield loss, but not about the quality. A friend had 1.4 g of very brown stuff. Not yellow, really brown, looking like cane sugar. He also had 100 mg of very greenish spice from chaliponga (pretty unsmokable in that state).
He mixed the whole and disolved it in 100 ml aciditic water (hcl), measuring PH was not needed, he just added hcl drop by drop until all spice is disolved. Liquid was filtered, then basified until no more precipitate forms (again no need to measure PH, it's become obvious when nothing new happens - it was however checked at PH 11.5-12).
50 ml of cold naphta was added, shaked a lot. It was very interresting to see that some brown things were forming at the surface of the basified water, between the two laters. My friend carefully took the clear naphta layer without the brown layer.
Freeze preciped and yielded 930 mg of very nice, fluffy almost white spice. So indeed a big loss of yield but the result will be very enjoyable while smoking the brown stuff was very harsh...