So I am following the Tao of Rue extraction, and have just finished filtering my alkaloids. They are brown. This is because of impurities and secondary alkaloids, I am assuming. Is there any way to clean excess lye from this substance without removing the secondaries? I don't mind (and even want) the secondary alks to stay for a full-spectrum extract; I have a great relationship with Harmala and I want my extract to be as much like the plant as possible...

So is there anyway to do this?

Since whatever is left has been freebased by the lye and precipitated out, it shouldn't be water soluble anymore. If you do the rinsing step shown in Gibran's caapi tek a few times, that should get rid of any excess lye traces without removing any (at least not too many) of the alks that are left.

The only thing with keeping the impurities in there is you have to up the dosage a little bit more to get the same effect. eg instead of taking 200mg for dmt activation you might need closer to 250 - 300mg to achieve the desired effect.

If you'd like a really full spectrum rue extract, just soak some seeds in some everclear for a month and then evap. You'll be left with some red goo that will never fully dry out but is pretty damn nice to consume. I never weighed what I took of it.. I just rolled it into little balls and swallowed with a bit of orange juice. Good stuff for sure.

Hope this helps and congrats on your success!

Thanks alot melodic catastrophe! Lol, yeah I should have used my common sense to tell me that plaij H2O is the answer to my question! However, I may just go ahead and manske these alkaloids just to have the pure thing for novelties sake and I'll do the alcohol soak you mentioned... Isopropyl alcohol would work similarly well to ethyl in this instance? I need to do more research on comparing/contrasting the various alcohols' utility as solvents - im just starting to gain enough base Chem knowledge to work these things out on my own... That'll be nice!

Anyway, thanks for the reply!

No need for brown harmalas. Just take the precipitates, dissolve in vinegar, filter, then basify again. The nice thing about the based harmalas is that you can wash them with tap water as much as you want, just give them plenty of time to settle in between washes and decant carefully. You don't really need to let them settle all the way, I usually just dump out half the water and refill. Keep washing until the water is crystal clear after settling. As they get more pure, they settle faster too.

Just don't use salt and they will still be "full spectrum." Usually after the second basing they are fairly clean, A third time would make them extremely pure. I stopped using salt and use the same basic procedures for both rue and caapi.

My pleasure

The reason I suggested ethyl alcohol is because it's relatively non-toxic to ingest and it does a pretty good job at collecting the harmalas.

Methanol is even better at collecting the harmalas but you have to completely evaporate it, which is difficult since the end product is so gooey. It would need some further purification to really make it safe to consume. If you could fully dissolve the resulting goo in some ethyl alcohol and evaporate it a couple of times, that might suffice.

Isopropyl doesn't do a very good job at collecting the harmalas and it's also toxic to consume so it's not really a good choice for getting the full spectrum goodies.

wait...do you have salts or freebase?

If you salted the harmalas after you freebased them than amber/brownish yellow is normal. Harmine and harmaline hcl will never be white..only freebase will be white..and more of like an off white sort of grey IME..

Anyway yeah wash them in water.

Very sound advice

save the wash water, a few days later i always find a decent amount of harmalas sitting at the bottom that would have otherwise been thrown away.

@Damon: thanks! So the vinegar step is just to separate the goodies from the inactive impurities? And then base again to re-precipitate them... Followed by the H2O-wash to get rid of excess lye, which is repeated until clear? Ok, this is starting to come together!

@Jaime: they are freebase but they aren't clean yet. They are the color of harmala!

@evil: good advice dude, I'll be doing that. All the filters and stuff I'm sure have quite a bit on them as well!

Thanks everyone, this place is amazingly awesome!

So I've been working on this harmala extraction for the past while, and have gotten to the manske step (two manskes so far), and have what looks like a large amount of very pretty honey-colored needles mixed harmala HCls. I was going to attempt making a full-spectrum extract, but just for the sake of completing the process I mansked.

So I am now about to filter the alkaloids and do the final basing, and I have just completed making my sodium carbonate. Here is my first question: after I baked the sodium bicarbonate, I realized that the pan I used WAS in fact aluminum! I know that it isn't recommended to use aluminum due to reactivity, but what is the danger here? Is the sodium carb I made somehow contaminated?

I found a video of a british guy reacting a hot sodium carbonate solution with aluminum foil and it gave off a thick plume of vapor which he proceeded to show was somewhat flammable, but he had no idea what it was exactly.

Ah well it seems to have worked! I have a pile of light-tan mixed harmalas here waiting tO be dried and weighed!