Hello Nexus,

I am often lurking and sometimes talking in the chatroom, but not much participating in the forum. I thought I should try to contribute somehow, even though so much has already been done. When I planned to extract harmalas from syrian rue to try another ROA for DMT [as a newcomer, I find vaping to be very intense and panicking/"anxiogene"], I thought that reporting about it would be a good contribution.

The experiment was to check the amount of harmalas left in the plant material after the first three boils generally recommended.
Here is my experiment:

I used an A/B tek with fumaric acid and lye. Each boil used tap water, 6.5 times the weight of the seeds.
I have divided my extraction in 4 steps :
1 - 3 boils of half an hour
2 - 1 boil of 1 and a half hour
3 - using a press on the hand-strained seeds after these 4 boils
4 - 1 boil of 1 and a half hour

The results are:
1 - 4.22%
2 - 0.45%
3 - 0.06%
4 - 0.11%

For a total yield of 4.8543%.

The press is a pasta machine actually, so I couldn't get everything out of the seeds. The seeds still weighed twice the original weight after pressing, so there was water still trapped in there.

Conclusions:
- As one can see, the pressing step was not really useful. I'll stick to handstraining with a cheesecloth in the future.
- The first three boils are enough to grab most of the harmalas, but the fourth boil still brought 0.5% yield. Considering the energy necessary for the boiling, I would say additional boils are not worth it.

Next time, I will try a long cold soaking before and after the first three boils.

I hope you enjoyed my report. I don't have any chemistry skills or equipment, so I did my best with my kitchenware.

(I didn't know if it could be viewed as an intro essay, so I posted here.)