Hey all,

I thought I would share this because of the lack of 500 gram A/B ACRB teks out there. I had 350 grams of shredded ACRB sitting in my closet just begging to be dealt with, so instead of doing multiple 50-100g teks, I went out and REMOVED 150g of powdered ACRB and did a 500 gram tek. The only tek I knew of for such a heroic extraction was thicklight's (which I like and dislike some of his steps) and I am familiar with cyb's (which I like because of the salt and defatting) so I decided to crunch the numbers and combine the two in such a way that worked for me.

- So to start I froze and thawed the bark in water twice.
- I took note of how much water I used when I froze the bark (can't remember specifically. Maybe 500ml) Then added water to make a total of 2L. I then threw the bark and water into a crockpot and let it simmer (on high) with 200mL of white vinegar for 5 hours. Once the five hours were up, I turned the crockpot down to low and let it simmer for another 3 hours.
- Took the mixture out of the crockpot and into a one gallon jar and let it cool to room temperature. Once at room temperature I defatted with 250mL of warm naphtha. (I recommend using a narrower vessel for this. Getting all of the naphtha out over such a large surface area was a pain. )
- I then boiled a liter of water and added 250g of deionized salt, dissolved it, then poured it into the acid/bark solution.
- Then I added 100g of lye in 100mL of water to the solution.
- I took the jar and put in in a bathtub of warm water overnight.
- After realizing the difficulty of decanting naphtha from the jar, I split the solution 4 ways into 4, 1L carafes (which worked beautifully with the pulls) and did ten pulls of 100mL of naphtha in each (I wanted to milk every last molecule out of there).
- freeze precip, re-x all that jazz..

Due to the size of the pyrex dish I was using, I had to take a break after 5 pulls each and freeze, then resume the pulling process a couple days later.

When I scraped the first dish, I was astonished to weigh in at 6 grams of spice. But after the re-x it dwindled down to 1.5g. (There was alot of red goo in there. No matter how careful you are, its inevitable to run into it. In my case alot...)

The second batch bestowed on me 0.6 grams. I didn't even bother to weigh it before the re-x.

So thats only a 0.4% yield, but it is damn plenty.

Some observations I made from this:

I realize now that thicklight may have been onto something with 10L of water. It goes back to the overloaded washing machine analogy. Three liters may not have been enough to get everything out.

It was incredible to see how cloudy the first three pulls from each carafe were. The smell of spice was strong in the naphtha.

In regards to the second re-x, the reason why I didn't weigh it prior is because there really wasn't much at all worth weighing. However, I think the added weight came from the measuring cup I used to re-x the first batch. I never cleaned the red goo out of it and I re-x'd the second batch in it as well. As I was heating it I noticed the goo start to boil, which may or may not have released spice, and the freeze precip was in the same pyrex dish I did the first re-x in (in which I did an unprofessional job scraping the first time). This is the only thing that makes sense to me considering the amount of spice I put in the re-x and the amount I got out. Looking at the amount that I got out for the second batch seemed to coincide with the exponential loss of spice per pull as you continue the pulling process.

Thoughts, questions, concerns? I figured I would throw this information out there just in case any of you are looking to experiment with the 500g tek.

I'm not too concerned with the amount of vinegar that was in there (I feel like I was at the target pH) and same with the lye (just considering it was enough to turn the solution black) but I was certainly no pro in weak acid strong base titrations in chemistry, so I bet I could have done better. My question to you is what would you have done differently?

Same goes for the salt and the naphtha defat. I just scaled up cyb's tek to decide which amounts to use.

Much Love,

Haven