maybe 2-3 table spoons ?
But I highly recomend using lye!!! Sodium carbonate always caused quite a mess for me, and I had to clean my alks with several more A/B steps than when I used lye.

2-3 tablespoons is about how many grams and will it be mixed into 50ml of water?

I would use lye, but it's hard to obtain here.

What do you exactly mean by a mess and more A/B steps?

Another matter came up:
I tried hammering the caapi with normal nail hammer and it seems like impossible task, I feel like I would need to dig into the grooves with sharp knife or something and shred it that way? Or is there any other techniques, such as with a saw?

Well my experience is that using Na2CO3 for crashing out the alks for some reason also traps alot of colored insolubles making your result very dark. you have to do some A/B steps, i.e. redissolve in acid, filter out insolubles, crash out again, several times to get really clean alks. Also the alks don't really settle as nicely as with lye. They form a kind of emulsion, even if put in the fridge, and it's hard to decant...

also you wouldn't have to add sodium carbonate to water and then add, you could just add it directly to the harmala-tea and watch it cloud. you add it until you get no more clouding, just like with rue-extractions.

If you did it with 50ml of water first, I suppose you could try to saturate your solution with sodium carbonate and then add the liquid to your tea. I don't know how much you'd need though. I always just did it until I saw no more clouding in the tea.

If I would use a saw to cut it into a slices of about 2cm and then using secateurs to cut it into smaller pieces, would it work?

Hammering just wouldn't do...

I would say yes. There are subtle differences based on the relative amounts of harmine and THH, but overall I’d have difficulty telling them apart. In a blind test I’m sure I’d be unable to tell them apart.

Another thing I’ve learned from doing caapi extractions is that caapi alkaloid content varies considerably. Depending on vender, maturity of vine and type/color of vine, I’ve had extraction results yielding as little as 0.25-0.30% (powdered red) and as much as 2.5%-3.0% (whole black). That’s a 10-fold difference!

When extracting, it seems to make sense economically to seek out the highest yielding caapi you can find. (Based on alkaloid yield, the red caapi I purchased was about 7X as expensive as the black!)

When you say whole black do you mean that you never shredded it?

I'm asking because I recently bought whole black from shamans garden
(sorry not sure if i am allowed to mention vendors here?)

I boiled it, pulled it apart in strips; boiled it again.
Freeze/thawed it...
Pulled it apart some more.
Boiled it.
Reduced, boiled a 2 time.

I proceeded with the normal basify.
And...
I got literally nothing.

I spent half as much or less time with old shredded white and got over or around 1%.

IS there such a thing as truly BUNK vine?

I purchased it whole, then shredded it myself. The vine shown in the photos on the first page of this thread is black caapi. The black caapi I used was purchased from the same vendor on several occasions, and each time the yield was at least 2%, and once it was 3%.

(I think I already have a post in the suppliers section – do a search using “gibran2” and you should find it.)

Wow, well that makes me feel better.
Although with all the vinegar and the peeling/stripping of it, I still find it really hard to believe that I would get next to nothing.
I wonder what happened.

I was having issues with shredding... Peeling it with pliers did the trick. About 0,2-0,5cm strips at a time. Easy and quick. Thanks all

Is the dosage of lye/sodium carbonate increased as the amount of caapi increases? And what about the both vinegar steps?

Is there a risk of adding too much sodium carbonate as a base? I added about 12g to 50ml for about 60g of vine, should be ok?

That's TOO much.
Na2Co3 solubility in water is 216 gram per liter.
21 gram per 100ml.
10.5 per 50 ml.

I believe no more than half by volume of a room temperature saturated na2co3 solution should be enough in any given harmala precipitation, even with lingering vinegar.

Simplest test -- and I wish some more people would check this:

Saturate (room temperature) water with Na2co3.
Better yet just follow that solubility figures.
Add 216 gram per liter h202 (1000 ml)
Now you have saturated ROOM temperature solution.
Don't saturate at higher temperatures unless you want excess Na2co3 because it holds twice as much at boiling temperature.

Slowly add saturated room temperature na2co3 solution to caapi water, until no more clouds form.
Add a tiny bit more for good measure.
This is the correct amount.

Let me know so I don't add too much next time.

Great tek

I just have a couple of quick questions which I haven't noticed to have been covered.

Do you add your acid each time you add fresh water to the vine to be boiled? Are you concerned that when you reduce the total liquid that you will form a solution that is actually quite concentrated in acid, and will then risk degrading the actives by boiling down to a small volume?
For example, if one were to add 25mL of vinegar (~5% acetic acid) per 50g of vine, for each of 4 pulls. The combined and reduced solution could potentially be quite acidic, if reduced to a very low volume for precipitation and evaporation.

IYE does it help to basify the solution gradually with a weak lye solution, so as to promote the slow precipitation of the alks and a greater particle size of the material? (i.e. allowing for a quicker settling of the solution and quicker/easier decanting and separation).

Cheers!

As far as adding acid goes, I do add a bit more vinegar with each boil, but I think that much of the acid boils off during reduction. Some acids, such as fumaric, don't boil off, and become more and more concentrated as you said.

Either way, I don't think excess acid harms anything - it just results in the need for more base later on and the production of more salts which need to be rinsed away.

I've always used a strong lye solution, but I add it slowly while stirring. Particle size of the alkaloids seem to be more a function of the alkaloid concentration - low concentration yields small particles or even just a cloudiness, high concentration yields big particles.

I'd expected as much, was just keen to hear from your experience.

Cheers

In the last step, when one has to check the PH... My water from the tap is PH 8.3, should rinse the solution until it reaches that PH? Or should one look for lower number?

thanks

I don't see how rinsing will bring it lower, and it's not necessary.

Rinsing serves two purposes - to remove excess base so that the product is safe, and to remove excess salts so that the product is pure.

When you say you hate the feeling and experience with peganum harmala, are you referring to the seeds whole, ground or in a tea, or are you referring to the extracted alkaloids?

There are a lot of extra nasties in rue seeds and by doing a proper extraction and a few manskes you can end up with pure harmalas which really changes the experience.

If you have a bad experience with both black caapi and syrian rue then it's most likely that you are sensitive to harmalas and need to cut back the dosage a bit.

Regarding black caapi: I don’t think that the alkaloid composition between strains or “colors” of caapi varies that much – they’re all mostly harmine and THH, but the alkaloid concentration varies considerably.

Let’s say that with aya you normally consume 100g of yellow caapi (containing 0.3% alkaloids). Your total dose would be about 300mg alkaloids. Now if you switch to a very potent black caapi (2% alkaloids) and don’t adjust the quantity downward, you’ll get a whopping 2000mg of alkaloids.

From personal experience, I’ve had 15g of black caapi that was very strong (later determined via extraction to contain 2% alkaloids). So I’m guessing I had about 300mg of alkaloids, which sounds about right given how it made me feel. Anyhow, imagine taking 100g of that! If you did, you might think black caapi has something in it that makes the experience just awful, when in fact it’s just very strong.

Oh yes - I bought red caapi for $10/100g and got 300mg yield. I bought black caapi for $17/100g and got over 2g.

So the red caapi was about $33/g extracted alkaloids.
And black was about $8/g. A much better deal.

I'd also advise to get whole vine - that way you know it hasn't been cut with anything, you have some sense of the quality, age, etc. Whole vine is also easier to work with in my opinion.


edit: I don’t know if black caapi is always higher in alkaloids than other colors, but in my limited experience it is significantly higher. However, I’ve only purchased black caapi from one vendor. It could be that they have an atypical supply of black caapi.

Take a look at this thread, beginning at post #192.