Close to the last stage of the extraction. Did the final base. The yellow/clear liquid looks nearly identical to your final pictures. But something weird happened.
After doing the last base..in about 3-4 minutes time the alks (or what appear to be) started slowly precipitating out. But theres 2 layers of alks it seems.
One layer is near the top of the glass floating, and the other half of the alks fell to the bottom of the glass? The color of the alks are a slightly tan/white color.
Should i just pour off into a filter or what should i do?

Extraction was done on 40g white shredded vine.

Thankss

Sometimes small air bubbles get trapped in the precipitate and cause it to float. It's an annoying problem. Repeated gentle stirring to release the air bubbles seems to help. Eventually, all of the precipitate should settle.

Anyone tried this with teh 4x caapi yet? i´m thinking about trying or if i shuold just do a ipa soak.

Thanks for the advice. I'll try gently stiring and see how that turns out. Thanks

Funny thing just happened. After posting on here I went to check the glass to stir and whatnot..and to my surprise..half of the floating precip on the top have fell to the bottom.. haha. I did stir the remaining floating precip to help it settle.

Will post a pic once the cameras charged.

There's an entire thread deedicated to the follies of 4:1 extraction...look in the harmala subforum, I believe.

Well as promised i did an extract on 40 or so grams of white caapi and heres a mid shot and a close up:

Just siphoned the base water off the alks and put fresh 200ml water in..stirred..and checked with ph papers.. around 11-12 ph. Several more washes to go. will keep posted

my brew is not settling, still a light brown color. what can i do to fix this?

How long has it been? Is there precipitation that is floating around at least? Maybe put it in the fridge for a couple of hours. Otherwise add a bit more lye and then try again to let it settle.

it's been about 30 minutes. No precip anywhere visible. I will add more lye solution

update: added additional lye solution and alkaloids began to form. thanks =)

alks definitely formed but the brew is still not as dark as the picture in the tek. the top of the brew also has some cloudy swirls going on. i put it in the fridge for now.

Sorry if this has already been asked, but have has anyone ever tried this method on Syrian Rue? Once again, I made an attempt and it failed failed failed! I've tried this like 5 times, and each time I think it will work. I think maybe I didn't filter enough, but then I clean and it still doesn't work. Upon adding lye, the solution becomes darker instead of lighter. I wondered if it was reduced too much. 150g of rue reduced down to 400ml. Added 15g of lye. Then the next day, when nothing precipitated, I upped the water level up to a litre, and added 50g more lye, and nothing happened.

I’ve tried it on rue a number of times, and got good results each time. Rue does seem to be “dirtier” than caapi – there’s a lot more stuff in it that precipitates out during both acidification and basification steps.

Have you tried a Manske on the same material that didn’t yield anything using this A/B? Maybe you just have weak seeds.

I assume you mean when brewing the caapi? Yes – I usually add just enough water to cover and boil covered.

I can not thank you enough gibran2 for this pictorial guide and all other help of course.

I just did another extraction from 70g of black caapi, but this time I made sure it was done exactly. I can not wait to find out how much harmalas have I got. I will post back as soon as its all dry.

ok so I extracted 546mg from 70g black caapi , I have probably lost a bit on the way but I think its quite a good yield 0.78%

Its not so nice and white like yours though. Next time I have to wash it even more at the beginning I guess.

I'm attempting this tek with 200g white caapi. 4x1-2 hours boils with acetic acid were done, filtered and reduced to approximately 500 ml. I basified this with 200ml water with 20g NaOH. After an hour, the amount of alkaloids that had precipitated were very small, so I assumed the pH was too low, as I used an excess of acetic acid under the brewing. I therefore added some more water and more NaOH.

To my surprise, nothing is precipitating, but a thin layer on top of the solution formed. It looks to me like the alkaloids are in this thin layer. What's up with that? I thought the alkaloids should form a layer at the bottom, which they indeed did before I added more NaOH. Any ideas on what I should do? I don't have a proper pH tester, only one for aquariums, which require the liquid to be transparent... Please help out with the extraction, I want to take a trip with pharmahuasca this weekend!

[quote=GinkgoTo my surprise, nothing is precipitating, but a thin layer on top of the solution formed. It looks to me like the alkaloids are in this thin layer. What's up with that? I thought the alkaloids should form a layer at the bottom, which they indeed did before I added more NaOH. Any ideas on what I should do? I don't have a proper pH tester, only one for aquariums, which require the liquid to be transparent... Please help out with the extraction, I want to take a trip with pharmahuasca this weekend[/quote]

Did you try to stir it a bit if it start to fall to the bottom ? Its a bit weird to me to have this at the beginning but its possible. Did you use all NaOH ? I remember I did not need to use all of it just enough for alkaloids to precipitate.

Maybe what you could try is put some vinegar in just enough to dissolve it all and then start all over again. But wait what gibran2 has got to say about it first his the expert here.

Also I am not sure about doing pharmauhasca this weekend it takes hours for one wash (for all alkaloids to settle down specially when they are tiny). I was doing mine for about five days just to make sure I have done enough washes and I have ph meter you don't that means you have to do maybe more just to make sure you have clean product at the end.

I am sure gibran2 will come soon to give you some advice as what may have gone wrong or what to do next.

i performed this extraction a couple weeks ago but i think i failed. used 65g black caapi, boiled 3x using cetric acid maybe for 20-25 minutes each.
ended up with a great yield. the color is a darker tan versus the off white in gibran2's ending photo.

took about 210mg in capsule and another 20-25 mg sublingually. had no effects, i did get in a slight meditative mood, but could of easily been placebo.
because im not getting any effects from the caapi, im leaning towards the fact it's a bad batch.