This is my first attempt using 50 g. finely shredded/powdered MHRB. Custom STB tek based on Lazyman and Entropymaster's guide

-Mixed about 50+ g. lye with 750 mL of water in an empty olive oil g. the bottle had been thoroughly washed of oil.

-Added MHRB - 50 g. of MHRB. Ordered 1 Kilo from online vendor for $80; only used 50 g. here due to small bottle size and to test out my tek
-Shook vigorously, let sit for 2.5 hours. The water looked typically black and watery (not jelly-like).

-1st pull: added 50 mL of HOT naphtha (boiled water with pyrex container flouting in it - turned off heat - added naphtha to pyrex container - let sit 2 minutes until Naphtha felt hot to touch)

-Turned end over end until well mixed. I found that the two layers separated quickly And without emulsions quite easily and later on in the tek I mixed the solvent in quite vigorously with no ill effect.

-Gave closed bottle a "hot shower" in the sink for 10 minutes. Once the bottle was hot I found that the layers stayed mixed together but when r
emoved form the sink the layers separated easily. I used the hot water bath to increase the interaction, so to speak, of the solvent and the lye water.

-Removed naphtha into a pyrex baking dish with a turkey baster. I think this was where the majority of my problems were, as I didn't really know what I was doing and did get a few tiny blobs/dots of black lye water in my naphtha.

-Set in sun to reduce volume while doing other pulls.

-2nd Pull- Same as first, but before heating up Naphtha I mixed 200 mL of water and 25 g. of lye in a separate container and then added it to the root bark water. Shook bottle vigorously, let sit for 10 minutes, then repeated Naphtha pull.

-3rd pull - same but used less Naphtha, maybe 30 mL

-4th pull - added a "dash" (20-30 mL) of Naphtha to bottle; shook vigorously; stored; will let sit for a week or so then pull Naphtha.

-Meanwhile all 3 first pulls were sitting combined, spread out in a pyrex baking sheet, in order to reduce volume. They sat another hour. By this time I noticed that while the Naphtha was a pale translucent yellow/white, there was a definite "blob" of orangey fluid sticking together at the bottom of the dish. When poured out into a smaller container with a lid, the orangey stuff collected in the corner and eventually went into the container and was frozen.


-The total first three pulls, collected (estimated volume of 75-100 mL) went in a rubbed-lidded, sealed, glass pyrex container (half-pint) into the back of a 'very cold' standard freezer. First however, 200 or so mL of water with a pinch of washing soda (sodium carbonate, grocery store) was added; layers were stirred, allowed to seperate; lower water layer was discarded. After this wash was complete the Naphtha was placed in the freezer.

-I just took it out to look, about 4 hours into the freezing. Opened it up, took a peek, put in fridge for 20 minutes and returned to freezer. here are my observations:

-Naphtha is milky. Definite 'mountains' of something, either mushy crystals or gooey stuff, is at the bottom. I suspect a combination of yellowy DMT crystals, and little pin-points of maroon-colored... impurities? jungle? fat? Also, below both of these I think is a layer of yello-orange goo. However, the freezing is by no means over and I don't know yet how it will look when it fully crystalizes and I pour off the Naphtha and let the crystals dry to a crisp. For all I know the goo might resolve into yellowy crystals.

My questions:
-Is it possible/reasonable that the semi-pure (pale yellow) DMT crystals separate themselves from the worthless (maroon-colored) impurities/whatever the hell it is? Or would one expect them to be combined simply in one orange-red impure-DMT crystal? If they are separate, is there any chance of me 'picking out' the good stuff with like tweezers or something and discarding everything else?

-How can I avoid all these colors in the future - from that orangey liquid in the naphtha too the orange goo and maroon dots?

Part of it is just that it was the first time and you learn much from experience. By the end I was an expert at removing Naphtha without getting lye water. etc.

Also, what purification steps do you recommend at this point? Residual lye has already (hopefully) been taken care of with Na2CO3 wash. I'm thinking recrystalization in warm Naphtha; that's easy enough. Is activated charcoal worth it?

Thanks for the help everyone

Will post results tomorrow

Update - at about 7 hours after putting Naphtha in to freeze, i removed it from the freezer, stuck it in the fridge for 20 minutes, and replaced it. before i replaced it i took a peek inside; still looked like an orange-red muck at the very bottom/center, with separate pale-yellow crystals forming all over the bottom half of the container where the naphtha was.

Removed from freezer about 9 hours after that. Poured off Naphtha immediately into large pyrex dish; set outside to evaporate. I heated up about 5-10 mL of Naphtha till it was very hot, and poured this onto the crystals/orange stuff/whatever, stirred it a little, and put it back in the freezer to recrystalize. The pale-yellow little dots seemed to dissolve into the naphtha pretty easily, but the orangey stuff tended to stick together as big blobs.

A few questions: what's up with the orange stuff and how do I avoid it.

it seems like it would be easy to scrape up the pale-yellow dots, which hopefully are decent quality dmt, and then just discard the orange stuff... does the orange stuff have goodies in it?

what do you recommend for future attempts so that i don't run into this again and what do you recommend i do now?

also, when i poured off the naphtha just now, i noticed a milky white fluid that seemed to be at the top of it - it got poured into the pyrex dish. could this be dmt that got re-dissolved as i took it out of the freezer and the naphtha warmed up slightly? or something else?

thanks for your help

So... I'm also new at the extraction thing. I've done one. I've been told that STB tends to create more yellow spice. Just the nature of it. Seems that its possibly contains more plant oils than a A/B extraction. Some people prefer this kind of spice. I do, having tried both. Little more time coming up. Just as intense though.
The yellow/red goop at the bottom of your jar after the freeze precip seems to be because of heating your mix. It seems to release more of the plant material. (oils and fats?) Mine was very dark yellow. I heated my mix only to 70c for 24hr. I've tried smoking this. It still contains DMT. Seemed to need bout 3 times as much (compared to the crystals)for the same intensity but it lasted bout twice as long. Close to 10 full min. I read once that people are saving the goop and putting it into their next extraction mix to get the DMT out of it.
Bout the precip, once it starts to heat back up even a little, the spice will start to dissolve back into the naphtha. I separated mine while it was still inside the deep freeze. Just poured it through a coffee filter.
But keep in mind, I'm very new at this. You should probably wait for more advice.
Good luck. Keep us posted.

my first extraction was using the lazymans tek. it works, but is highly wasteful and a pain to perform as it uses sub-standard equipment. i also encountered the red color you are describing. im not sure if it was a little bubble of basified water that was sucked up or if it was something residual on the pyrex evaporating dish that reacted with the solution. i found that an ammonia wash helped get rid of it. as far as the color of your final spice, there is no way to gauge potency by it. i find that pale yellow spice is much better than pure white spice and that spice from later pulls is the best. all i can say is to practice. i can do pulls in my sleep now. remember, spice is your friend. spend a lot of time with it. it will teach you things that no one, save God, can.

can you point me to some good threads on the goop? do you think that doing the entire extraction at room temp. in the future would help avoid it?

update - ended up, after rextalization/drying, with just an oily goo that ranged from orangey-red to pale-yellow. tried smoking it in a homemade lightbulb-vape... probably didn't know what i was doing, since it was my first time with dmt or a vaporizer, but i definitely inhaled something foul and harsh...felt weird for 5 minutes....could have been a sub-standard dmt dose or god knows what else. i threw away the rest of the goo - i have plenty of rootbark so i'm just gonna try again.


right now i have this concoction sitting in a 1 L wine bottle:
-50g root bark
-750 mL tap water
-75g lye
-20-30 mL fresh naphtha
-30-50 mL naphtha that had been sitting on the first extraction for 2 days (was going to be the fourth pull but I just threw it in here)
-~200 mL of lye/water/rootbark mixture from first extraction

it will probably sit for a total of 5 or 6 days before pulling naphtha... do you think i'll still need multiple pulls or will this one get it all? it is a fair amount of naphtha - 80 mL-ish - for 50 g. of bark... do you think freeze-precip will work or will i need to evaporate down some of the volume of the naphtha to get it more concentrated?