I was just at the grocery store and came across some double concentrate cleaning vinegar. It is labeled 10% acetic acid by volume and regular vinegar is 5%
To me it just seemed like normal vinegar only stronger.

Wondering if i could use this in my next extraction and just use a a smaller amount to reach desired PH in acidifying stage?

Technically, cleaning vinegar isn't food grade certified. But neither is naphtha or, in general, sodium hydroxide. It is probably not a problem in most extractions, but I wouldn't put it on a salad.

In terms of cost/risk benefits, I'd go with the food grade white vinegar. If you can only get the cleaning vinegar, go with that.

As long as it doesn't have any nasty additives, why not?

Heck, I just dump a whole load of hydrochloric acid in my cooks, couldn't be any worse than that!

Well, you don't know if it does. Do not assume that it does not. Maybe it isn't a big issue in extractions where eg. naphtha is also involved, but I wouldn't want a dash of cleaning vinegar used in an ayahuasca boiling.


Indeed, too much hydrochloric acid will degrade both your pans and the dmt. DMT does not like very strongly acidic conditions.

This is a touchy subject. From my first thread



Has anyone proved that dmt degrades at low ph?

Lol. Really? I think that there are quite some more "touchy" subjects on the forum.


Maybe somewhere in the chemical literature? IIRC some of the forum members who is a real chemist stated that it is sensitive to low pH. Since I am not, I can only speculate that the indolic nitrogen can be protonated at sufficiently low pH and that this could destabilize the indole nucleus. You should check out the literature on indole chemistry if you want to know for sure. Or wait until a chemist chimes in.

(EDIT: I searched a bit but couldn't find anyone else but me claiming this on this forum - oh, at least benzyme didn't protest a few posts after I claimed this. Maybe I read it in some tryptamine thread on sciencemadness.org ?)

You could do an experiment yourself: put a gram of dmt in 100 ml concentrated HCl and boil it for an hour or more under reflux (so that you'll not be boiling off the HCl). Then base and extract the solution and weigh how much is left of the dmt. A a control, you could dissolve a gram of dmt in a very dilute solution of HCl and base and extract that alongside, to compensate for mechanical and extraction losses. That could yield some proof.

I trust you know what your talking about, I wonder if you have considered the amount of time that might occur in? Perhaps it might only take weeks to degrade the DMT if it does so at all.

Once I am able to go beyond a 0.2% yield from ACRB I might try that experiment. My poor yields could be because I am using a PH of 1-2. It's touchy because I have spent so much time cooking with low PH and have had terribly poor yields (few hundred milligrams from half a kg of bark).