hi everyone,

i am just wondering what kind of acids do you use to make water acidic for a extractions?

in this mini A/B Earthwarker talks about a ph of 2 for water, by my understanding i will not be able to do this with vinegar.
what kinds of acids you use for this?
also if someone from central EU is here, where would you buy those? at least where i live it is not easy to buy strong acids

HCl is probably the easiest to source for your purposes, and will easily reduce your pH to 2.

vinegar is 5% acetic acid, with a pH of 2.6. fine for most extractions, as most alkaloids are fully protonated at that pH.

I go with the two above. HCl and Vinegar can be bought in food grade and the good thing they fully evaporate.

You can go for other acids like citric acid too but dont forget that those will stay in solution.

Many years ago, I used HCl (muratic acid). It worked well enough, but I had to buy two gallons when I only needed a couple hundred mL. Eventually, I had to buy baking soda in bulk to neutralize the excess for disposal. It is really nasty stuff and the vapors will turn everything metallic green.

Eventually, I started using distilled white vinegar and saw no difference in yield. Do not dilute it as it is already dilute. 5% is better, but 3% will work just fine. And consider that it is a weak acid. It will donate protons to all the spice or other alkaloids, but just takes longer. It may be overkill, but I would always let my vinegar washes soak for two or three days before starting the next wash or doing any filtration.

Another thing that I'd like to point out is that NaOH (lye) is another dangerous chemical that is completely unnecessary. Sodium carbonate works just fine. You have to use a bit more, but it is dirt cheap and won't burn your skin/eyes. Worst case scenario, sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) can be converted in the oven.

sorry for the chemistry noob question,
but if dilute vinegar with a ph of 2.6 with nutral water 1 to 1 wouldn't the ph be way above 4
do you do the mine a/b in with pure vinegar?
in the link in my first post it says to have a ph of 2 - 3 for the dmt to go into the acidic water

No

pH is logarithmic.

if 5% acetic acid has a pH of 2.4

Diluting it by half, adding equal volume of distilled water, will give a solution with a pH of 2.55 ish

thank you, that makes so much more sense!




that is very interesting. how much more are you talking about?
i use Cybs' Hybrid ATB 'Salt' Tek, it says 50g of lye. how much baking soda would you use in that tek?
in the tek the base sits for about 2 houres, i always let it sit over night, i guess that should be fine with baking soda as well.

To be clear, I am not talking about sodium BIcarbonate but sodium carbonate. Sodium carbonate can be bought but not at the grocery store. If you get sodium bicarbonate from the grocery store, it must be cooked at 400F for a couple hours before it becomes sodium carbonate. You can taste a small amount of each and you WILL know that it is no longer sodium bicarbonate. Sodium carbonate is MUCH stronger and will allow your pH to get high enough for spice to migrate to a non-polar solvent. It will not harm you, but the taste is quite strong and unpleasant. Unlike lye, you can add it straight into your acidic solution without worrying about destroying spice from pH spikes.

I have never actually measured how much I use. It's very difficult to use too much. I watch for color change and then add a bit more. My measurements are of pH and I'll try to target the pKa of 10.32 and then add a healthy amount more. This ensures that even after some spice has migrated to the non-polar, there is still a wide deficit of protons to keep spice migrating.

sodium carbonate is OxiClean.

Also contains hydrogen peroxide and surfactants/detergents.

hmm, yea..that would definitely leave a film between phases.
could prep a sol'n and run it through molecular sieves, but it's much easier
to microwave some arm&hammer for 5 min.

After finding no info on it i tried microwaving sodium bicarbonate into sodium carbonate, it works but it's dangerous, i spread some sodium bicarbonate on a glass dish and when i came back after around 8 minites the center of the dish was glowing blue, the heat rised so much that the glass dish and the microwave glass dish melted together at the center and the rotating plastic parts all melted... the microwave is still working normally after replacing the dish and the plastic parts and the sodium carbonate was used to wash DMT successfully... i also broke 2 microwaves in that week haha
So anyone reading this please don't try it..

that's strange. I've done it for 5-10 mins, in borosilicate. only observation was mild popping from CO2 dissociation.
alternatively, one can bake it at 400 for an hr or two.

ive heated the stuff in a pan on the stove, or in the oven at 400, both work great.

I often use the microwave to dry sieves in a borosilicate beaker. They can get extremely hot if they are wet, but if they are mostly dry, then even after 5-6min in the microwave they are only barely warm to the touch.

Same goes for sodium carbonate in my experience, i nuked some for 5min to see if it was dry, and it barely went up in temp.

Glass is pretty much invisible to microwaves. At least, decent borosilicate glass is. Same goes for the zeolite clay and the dry carbonates.

I couldn't find an explanation for what happened since like you said it was all dry
The dish i used is the lid of glass microwave casserole that i used many times before and the sodium carbonate was intact, so it didn't react or burn..

My method is no more than 5mm thick in a pyrex baking dish in the oven at 400F for two hours. It is pretty much fail safe. Or if you want to be lazy, just go to google and search "sodium carbonate sale". The stuff is obviously super cheap and you'll probably pay more for shipping than actual product.

I'm guessing that the glass was (tempered) soda lime glass, since that is most common and most American baking dishes and even American brand name Pyrex caserole dishes are made of soda lime glass. Pyrex purchased outside of the US is made of true borosilicate, which can withstand much higher temperatures. It's possible that your sodium bicarbonate decomposed rapidly to sodium carbonate which then became molten with additional heating as the microwave kept going, eventually melting the glass at the smallest point of heat transfer between the dish and the glass plate. I

I personally always use borosilicate when microwaving reaction mixtures and while I've had beat up beakers shatter from years of heat stress, I can't say I've ever seen borosilicate fuse to borosilicate or tempered soda lime glass in a microwave (or even with a propane burner).

I just checked the brand arcuisine and on their site they say it's borosilicate
Though you explained perfectly why it happened at the center cz the lid is curved and not flat
Sorry jiva if this is ruining your post

it is quite interesting

also my GF is worried i am going to blow up the microwave now...