SWIM told me to tell you "I have a crock pot and everything but I'm doing STB only because I don't want to spend the money on more muratic acid if I don't already have some left. Please look at this picture and tell me if I need to buy a coffee grinder or not to turn the bark into real powder. BTW the picture I posted was all ground by hand and using a sort of food processor sort of think it's about half powder half small small mulchy chunks. Also am I stupid for doing a STB? should i kick in for the acid and do a a/b? I did a/b with powder last time and it turned out poorly but i also didn't have ph paper."

Freddy the bear used bark that looked just like that for his first STB. The coffee grinder just wasn't going to get through it. The bark gave up the goods but it took a long time to break down n the lye. Freddy's best pulls were after several days. His spice was very oily and had to re-xtal to lose the yellow.

so in other words grind it down more? i was thinking of doing lazy mans tek and doing it in a few hours?

Yea u better grind it more. coffee grinder worked for me, however i just have broken my mothers blender trying to grind my stuff lol. how fne is ur powder is how fine amount you will get in the end i think. in your picture half of the stuff looks well grinded but others not. so what i mostly do i grind it get the fine powder and leave some small hairy yellowish stuff out as much as i can.

Wooley looking fiber is okay, chunks are not.
Cough up the ten or twelve bucks and get a cheap coffee grinder.
The lazyman tek sucks - do it right, not easy.

FWIW, you can use almost any acid. Vinegar or citric acid will work just fine.

hmm thats gud that you told me that.. coz i mostly used to throw away that wooly looking fiber lol.



no its not stupid do to STB lol, yield is yield its up to you from which way to go and get your product to smoke actually. But if you have a change trying A/B would also be nice since experience never hurts anyone may be u like A/B more if you succeed and wanna keep doin A/B. But ofcourse if its a long story for you stick to STB then works fine for sure

STB seems to be fine for chunkier pieces, if you dont have a grinder that looks like it would be fine, Ive read something where an extraction was done STB on whole pieces of unground bark and it still had a yield, i'm pretty sure thats right so what you have should be just fine, no need to spend all that money on a grinder if you dont have it right away.

peace and love

For SWIM the crock pot stb is so much easier and faster than A/B with a higher and more consistent yield that he can't see doing an A/B for mimosa extraction. He freezes the mimosa before using a blender to powderize it. The fiberous material will just take longer to extract into the lye water. He has had situations with A/B where the spice stayed in an oil form when evaporated. SWIM has noticed that when melted by heat spice can take a surprisingly long time to recrystalize.