I wrote this tek as a guide which is friendly to newcomers to extracting small batches of bark. I intended it to avoid the most basic pitfalls of extractions which usually have to be inquired about elsewhere on this site. The tek itself is nothing revolutionary, it includes no new chemical processes but does include some advantageous tweaks over some more basic teks.
This is an emulsion-free tek as far as I am concerned (hence the higher measurements of some chemicals and more water). You can could shake the living daylights out of it with no worry. This is beginner-friendly and includes such things as the use of heat during extraction to aid solubility, evaporating some naphtha before freezing to make sure spice will precipitate and a better choice of vessel shape for pulling naphtha easily. An optional boil and salt to help jump the DMT into solution early and buff up the ionic strength of the solution is said to take some of the work out of getting a good yield. Because this tek is for small batches the boiled and pre-softened bark will be left in to keep yield up and fuss down... no filtering necessary.
Without further ado:
You will need:
- Water...
- A solvent, usually naphtha (ronsonol, vm&p, zippo fluid, etc), hexane or heptane.
- A large glass bottle, 1.5l is optimal.
- 50g MHRB (Or ACRB).
- 130g NaOH (lye, caustic soda).
-(Optional) 30G sea or table salt (NaCl).
-(Optional) 50 ml vinegar (5% acidity, check the bottle first).
- Syringe or siphon. No rubber, and try to avoid plastic, use glass if possible.
- A freezer.
- Glass baking dish (preferable). Jars or glasses will also work fine.
1: Blend or grind 50g of MHRB shredded bark into a fibrous powder..
2:
(This is optional and may increase yields (unverified), it also makes the bark easier to get into the bottle as dry bark powder is annoying to get through the thin stem).Add the bark powder and 500ml of water with 50ml of vinegar to a saucepan. Bring this to a gentle simmer for about an hour.
3: Add this to a 1.5l wine bottle (Do not use an aluminium cap!), then add 130g of Sodium hydroxide (caustic soda/lye) and an optional 30g of salt. Agitate the vessel to mix the solution as will get hot as it reacts. Don't let it clump at the bottom or it can potentially crack the glass from the sudden heat. This much lye controls emulsions and the salt makes the basic soup more polar, which may also help to stop emulsions forming and encourages the alkaloids to jump from the polar solution to the nonpolar layer.
4: Top up the water level to the curve of the stem. There should be enough space left for 50ml of naphtha. You also want a small amount of air left above the naphtha (see attached images). Don't add the solvent just yet, leave this to cool for about half an hour and allow the caustic solution to break down the bark. DON'T TIGHTEN THE LID YET!
5: Go ahead and add your 50ml of naphtha and check the remaining space. When the solution is warm, things expand, leaving less space above the solvent. Screw the lid and mix the layers by turning the bottle end over end until your naphtha is saturated. The more time you spend on this, the better. No need to watch them separate again and again, just mix it. 15 minutes is good, half an hour is better.
OPTIONAL: To ensure that you successfully grab the maximum amount alkaloids from the solution, you can give the bottle a WARM water bath when it cools to room temperature after the heat from the lye reaction has worn off. In some colder climates this may be necessary. Make sure not to have the glass in contact with the hot metal- use some scrunched up aluminium foil or some jar lids. DO NOT OVERHEAT OR YOUR VESSEL MIGHT BREAK... You can see the naphtha layer lowering, creating more space as the solution cools. Keep the whole thing warm and you will have a better chance of getting the goods as the solubility non-polar layer increases with heat. If you choose to do this make sure you DO NOT SCREW DOWN THE LID when heating.
6: Time to pull off the top layer once you are confident it is saturated. Using a syringe or similar, suck up the top layer. The thin bottle stem makes this very easy to do without drawing up the dark aqueous layer. Add this to a small glass baking dish or something similar. It should cloud up when you lightly blow on it, which means it is saturated.
7: Pull another 3 rounds of 50ml of solvent. Each pull will be less saturated than the last, the fourth pull being mainly just a precaution to get the last remaining alkaloids.
8: Precipitation time! If your combined naphtha pulls still cloud spontaneously as you blow on it, you can proceed to placing it in a freezer. If the solvent does not cloud up in this way, allow some to evaporate for a few hours. The idea is to get the solvent amount reduced to the point where it is more saturated with alkaloids before freezing. You can also use a warm or cool fan, but be aware a cool fan can precipitate some DMT out prematurely. About half the volume of solvent should remain (in this case 100ml), with everything still dissolved into it. If a cool fan crashes out any DMT before you freeze the pulls, just sit the dish in a bath of hot water and stir to redissolve everything.
Cover the dish in cling film (saran wrap) or aluminium foil.
You have a better chance of getting good crystals by lowering the temperature of the solvent as SLOWLY as possible. Let it stand at room temperature for a few hours, then place it in the fridge, then the freezer overnight. By the next morning all of your product will have dropped out of solution. Pour off the naphtha and quickly dry the product. You can use a fan if the crystals are large and stuck well to the glass but small powdery crystals (a result of precipitating very quickly) are likely to be blown away (DON'T USE HEAT WHEN DRYING CRYSTALS!). Filtering naphtha containing crystals can lead to problems with melted room temperature product being absorbed by the filter, which needs to be rinsed through with solvent and the solvent evaporated to recover lost yield. It's preferable to draw as much solvent away from the crystals as possible before drying them, as room temperature naphtha will dissolve some of the yield. Good practice is to draw up or pour away the naphtha, then let the container jar or dish sit upside down for half an hour or so in the freezer. This will allow a little more solvent to run down to the lid, which you can remove whilst upside down before drying the crystals.
9: RE-X : for every 100mg of product add 10ml of fresh naphtha. You want to create a heat bath just as before for the extraction vessel and get almost the whole product to dissolve, leaving behind any sediment. If you have an electric hob (Don't be an absolute tool by using a gas one!) you can use a jar in a pan of water as a double boiler. Use very low heat and be patient. You can also use hot or boiled water in a sink though you might want to replace the water with new hot water if it cools too soon. Don't stir or agitate the solvent as you want impurities to be left settled at the bottom. Once your product is dissolved, decant it away from the crud. DO NOT THROW THE CRUD OUT YET, it may still crystallize when left at room temperature, meaning it contains still more DMT . Slowly cool the solvent as mentioned in step 8.
If you want a full yield of pretty crystal shards, you must try to keep them separate from the thinner layers of alkaloids which coat the rest of the glass. You may notice that the walls and especially the base of your precipitated crystal jar or dish has a more uniform layer which usually needs to be scraped up. Instead of scraping this, try to just release the glassy shards on their own with a small brush or something similar (something like a very small watercolour brush). Recrystallize anything else that needs to be scraped just as in step 9, again leaving behind any crud or highly discoloured alkaloid goop. Eventually you will have nothing but clear shards and a small pile of crud from multiple recrystallizations.
Crud from RE-X is usually packed with DMT but hard to clean up with naphtha alone. A 'mini A/B' will make short work of it. This is simply dissolving it all into a minimal amount of fairly hot distilled white vinegar, carefully adding water and base (lye is least likely to cause emulsion even at this consistency) and pulling the alkaloids with naphtha as before. A great deal of fats or oils will be left behind in the water layer and this can be discarded once exhausted.
It's more economic to save crud and goop from multiple cleans before you perform a mini A/B on it. Providing you took care not to pull any basic mixture, you might be very surprised how much much of this crud is still DMT.
Common yields for spice are from 1 to 2 % with MHRB. Store your keys to hyperspace in a cold, dry, dark place in an airtight container.