Awesome brother! Let us know what your end yield turned out to be.

Well, Suppose that I added a bit too much lye . Im starting to think that the top cloudy layer that I was talking about earlier may be the harmine/harmaline alks seperated by a clear brown layer. I thought that it had dropped when I swirld the mix but it made its way back up and had actually formed some needles on the sides of the jar.
Anyway I decanted the liquid into another jar and now am wondering what I can do to see if these alks will fall out?
Thanks again!

re- scale. It turns off faster than i can get everything into the container to weigh it, so i just took two pics.

I agree, it could be cleaner but its clean enough for me. I only had enough kosher salt for the one manske, i may do another manske on it to get it a bit cleaner once i get some more. since this was my first go so i was impatient and wanted to get a final yield number. I just started another round with 120G of rue, and plan to be much more patient with this batch and aim to end with a really pure product. I am not too concerned with yield anymore since this delivered a lot more harmalas than i was expecting, so purity will be top priority this time. Thanks again for this beautiful tek, i had so much fun doing it!

try placing your container on a speaker, or if you have one a subwoofer. The slight vibrations do a good job of getting suspended harmalas to settle and get everything to separate very nicely.

as far as too much lye, just do some extra washes with distilled water. you can always siphon all the liquid, and dissolve the harmalas in vinegar to get your PH to a known value, then add the minimum amount of base to get your harmalas to precipitate. i personally dissolve a bit of lye in water, then use a glass eye dropper to add the lye/water solution in one drop at a time. Once it goes cloudy,add a few extra drops to make sure all the goodies crash out, then resume the tek.

Ok im still having problems for some reason...Generally how much hot vinegar/water do you add to dissolve all of the alks? I have already added a full quart and it's still not dissolving....
The first two pics are after I added the hot vinegar and the last is before, which im guessing is very alkaline and is why the gar isn't dissolving it.

You shouldn't add any more water to the mix, just vinegar. Any water added will only dilute the vinegar and you'll have to use more. If you have some powdered citric or fumaric acid, that would work as well. If not, just add strait vinegar while stirring and it should eventually dissolve.

Once it does, you'll want to filter it again and possibly reduce it again to get it back to a workable volume. I'd filter it again once it's reduced as well just for safe measures.

Once you're back to this point, do as evil804 suggested and add the lye solution slowly while stirring the mix. There should be two color changes.. Keep adding until the color doesn't change anymore.

Sorry you're having such a hard time with it, but it's all a part of the learning process!

Just don't give up or throw anything away. Good luck!

wow thanks for the quick response, I actually did only add vineger. The good thing is that I have a 2.5 litre mason jar so I can easily transfer it and add lots of vinegar.

earlier, you talked of adding 40G to a quart worth or solution. do you mean 40G of lye, or 40G of water with lye in it? if you added way too much lye, you may need to wash the harmalas with water to get some of the lye out of there. if there is still a lot of lye in there, the vinegar will not be able to do its job and acidify the brew. you should not need a lot of vinegar, if i recall correctly i only needed 300ml to dissolve 2.5G worth of harmalas.

How many water washes have you done since you added the lye?

Ok thanks guys, we are back on track lol! Things are looking better than just good now.
So earlier when I added too much lye and the layers were seperated ( I was guessing was the harmine/harmaline and looks like it is for sure now) I had decanted the liquid from the fallen alks into another jar and left it for a few days. When I returned to it, I noticed that there was a thin layer of fallen alks....right on! then what I did was decant the vinegar from the first jar ( the one that had a litre of vinegar which didnt dissolve the alks) into the second jar and voila!.!. It turned into that milky colur and a nice pile of alks precipitated.

I may be wrong but im thinking that when the water was too alkaline either the harmine or harmaline (not sure which one right now but it is the more tan coloured alkaloid, couldn't precipitate until I brang the PH down. Also we can maybe learn from my mistake if this could possibly make seperation easier??

the border where harmine precipitates before harmaline is very small. from my experience when using lye and not measuring the Ph accurately (ph meter) you easily overshoot this border because lye is very strong base and you need to use diluted solutions of it to bring the ph slowly exactly where you want it.

so if i understood what you wrote,you made very alkaline solution,and by that you precipitated both of the alkaloids in the solution. 92 % of the harmine already precipitates at ph 8.75 with some % of harmaline.you can do that with regular sodium bicarbonate.

isolation of harmine

the way i see it,now you should at least wash your precipitates by decanting and adding fresh tap water at least 3 or 4 times. You will remove a lot of coloration and reaction by products from the acids and bases. It is time consuming but it is a must for cleaner extract imo.

Than, judging by the color of the alks i would dissolve them again in vinegar and wait for insoluble matter to fall down and for the acidic solution to clear up. You will have much cleaner alks. read on the chemistry behind this and understand it, you will have much less troubles.

Hey guys, I was thinking about performing the Manske thing, but it appears that my salt is "naturally rich in calcium and iron".

Can I use it or is it better to buy some cheap simple pure NaCl salt?

I recommend just plain ol' sea salt w/o iodine. I have no idea about calcium and iron rich salts. I assume that's trace elements picked up from the sea? Others recommend rock salt as well but I'm not familiar with it personally.

My .02 - find some kosher salt. my first extraction i used kosher salt and had no issues with my manske step, got big chunky crystals. second go around i used a sea salt w/ no iodine, and got red sediment as my precips. when i based the resulting precipitates they came out as a thick gelatinous red goo as opposed to the light tan precips from the first go. ingredients listed only sea salt, so perhaps certain minerals present in sea salt can interfere with the manske precipitation. from now on i am only going to use this stuff

Thank you, I've done some research on different salts, and will buy the refined salt.
It should be almost pure NaCl, maybe Kosher is also refined?

The result from 400g Rue, second Manske, around 20g of "double vertebrae quality" harmalas
(sorry the image is blurry)



Thank you for this great tek

Looks good

If I were you, I would keep repeating the process to get it cleaner and cleaner

Thank you, it is the community's baby, also I just went to see elves, they say hello to nexus!

How many Manske do you do before final basing with sodium carbonate? I was planning to do just 2 but you can still help me change my mind!

Ive done just few, and ive done many.. All depends on your own patience and prefferences.. You can always base/dry some part (half? ) so you can ingest already if wanted, and keep purifying the rest... It can be kind of like meditation, to get it ever cleaner, precipitating, filtering, redissolving, filtering... Alchemy

Great job!

Hey melodic catastrophe,
When it comes time to do the second manske, are you dissolving your alks in a water/vinegar solution or just water? Im asking because my first manske produced nice long needles like the ones in your picture, but the second time around I used just water and salt that gave me very small needles which didn't crash/sink and it looks like yellow snot lol.