Swim had done a few stb extractions before so he was semi experienced. He had been using Whatcha's tek untill this time.

Swim pretty much kept the tek the same except he added the mhrb to measured roasting hot tap water and shook like hell and transferred straight to a hot warm bath. He let it sit for 5 minutes then added very hot water to the bath again after shaking vigourously again. He allowed this to cool in the bath with intermittent shaking (probably for 3/4 of an hour)
Swim actually panicked at this point because he realised he had put the mhrb in before the lye :O

The mhrb soup was still quite warm and the water bath was warm, he then started adding the lye very slowly and shook and stood until all the lye was in the soup, the HDPE2 jugs stood the heat no probs.

A really hot water bath was ran again and the solution was shaken and gas realeased and sat in bath for a while.
Swim measured out his amount of naptha that was needed and shook the jug and let settle on the worktop on paper kitchen towels.
He funnelled in the naptha and capped and shook very vigorously and let sit in very hot bath.

When the time felt right he then siphoned off the naptha into whiskey glasses and let sit for a half hour. These glasses were covered and placed in fridge for ten minutes and then into the freezer for 6 hours. The naptha was very yellow but absolutely no lye solution got in.

I wish i had pictures but the spice that was produced was quite orange and powdery. As it turns out it was some of the best spice he has had. He found it inpossible to fully breakthrough on it tho which sounds bad but it really wasn't.


He is going for a cold water extraction next time and hopefully he will produce beautiful white crystals, pics will be included thanks.

Do a solvent wash to make sure you get all contaminants out of the product. The number one issue with breaking through is purity of the spice. if it is impure you cant get it down fast enough but if the concentration is high you can break thru with only 2 inhalations. At least that has been my experience. As long as you have th esmoking method down right you should be able to break thru with pure spice everytime. Again that's how I experienced it.

cheers vovin

Swim forgot to add that this tek produced just over two grammes from 100g of mhrb. He thinks the hot water must have broken the mhrb down further thus producing more spice

Was SWIY using powdered, shredded or whole bark? 2g sounds like a very high yield, but not completely unheard of. After SWIY's cold water experiment is complete, perhaps a 'traditional' STB could be done on the same bark to compare the relative effectiveness of the two methods. Also, (as Vovin mentioned) if the product from the hot water method was orangey in color, it may have pulled out some contaminants. SWIY could recrystallize to determine actual spice content. If any of this is done, please have SWIY report back with results.

-JM

shredded