I have brewed what I hope will be an exceptional San Pedro tea, which I will be taking this weekend. I may have complicated things by using hydrochloric acid, but things have gone smoothly up to this point. I have reduced the tea considerably and have been left with a sludge--a thick viscous sludge. I have the following questions:

-Can I reduce this further without burning?
-Is the PH dangerously low?

if you've actually done this then throw the sludge away. why did you use hydrochloric acid? maceration without acidification will work fine. i'd suggest trying an evaporated ethanol tincture for next time.




http://www.mdguidelines....ffects-hydrochloric-acid

well i certainly would not ingest it with excess hydrochloric acid, since its still a solution (tea) it definitely has excess acid. the reason hcl is decent for salting is when you evaporate it hcl is unstable out of solution and breaks down into the atmosphere, but since your tea is a tea well.... you could approach this a couple ways :

1. evaporate your tea. because its been converted to hcl and hcl is heat resistant, i mean i throw hcl solutions on a searing hot stove and watch it boil off under a hood and have fine product. you can easily reduce it safely with heat (the fumes are dangerous so do so in a well ventilated area) with your tar youll wanna break it up as much as possible, you might even be able to throw it in the oven after its nearly sold (free of liquid and excess hcl) and bake it to totally make it anhydrous then do your best to powder it/ break it. you could wash this tar with dry acetone to remove excess hcl (just a tiny bit, but you still dont want it in your stomach) and other irrelevant components that are in your tar, leaving you with a refined hcl tar that after total evaporation should be fine to ingest orally (provided you exposed every bit of your hcl tar to washes with acetone to remove the excess acid, which may be very difficult without playing with it alot)

2. you could filter what you can/ decant a pure solution, reduce it to a manageable amount and bassify then pull with nps and resalt with dilute hcl solution and go from there.


whatever you decide keep us posted, but for damn sure, dont eat it till you process it further

HCl boils away during the reduction steps so it's not that you're going to consume any concentrated HCl solution. The safest approach here is to try measure the pH here and/or try a small sample. Should there be sharp sour taste, that's bad news. In the latter case just try to base it with a tiny amount of baking soda.

If you supply us with how much HCl you used, we'll be able to tell you how to neutralise it, (in the unlike case that it hasn't boiled off).

mew's advice of drying it completely is also great as this will not only remove the water, but the HCl as well.

Thank you for the replies. I used very dilute reagent grade HCl with the understanding that as the concentration increased, it would eventually boil off. I know some people might not dare use it, but I personally am confident that if all the proper precautions are taken, the risks should be minimal. I hope I will be able to count this as a success, but do not worry: I have enough sense not to consume it as is.

My "HCl tar" as I'm going to refer to it does not react with aluminum foil, so I take this to be a good thing.

How important is it to acidify a tea for consumption? I've read some who do and some who don't , and both seem to get great experiences. If one were to, how much vinegar would one use? I've used citrus so far, and just a couple lemons in a batch. Can't tell if it makes a difference or not. Also read from some sources that citrus should be avoided as part of cactus dieta, so considering vinegar this time. I've got just regular white vinegar.

I sampled the tar that I have been left with, and it seems to burn my tongue...

Ok so I have evaporated a dilute solution of hydrochloric acid before, I think when I last attempted a mescaline extraction, and my understanding is that hydrogen chloride evaporates off completely before all of the water evaporates. I'm being cautious, but do I really have anything to be that concerned about?

It is pretty clear to me now that the HCl did not simply boil off during the reduction process. I suppose that it becomes more and more concentrated until all of the water has evaporated. This is troubling. I will attempt to make the tar completely anhydrous.

or add a mild base to neutralize, like baking soda
i think you'll be left w/salt as a by product

I might end up doing that at this point. How could I even dry this out? It's a thick tar, like the equivalent of the ISO tar I suppose. Clearly it's hydrated, but I would hate to burn anything. I have either an oven or a dehydrator.

youll be hard pressed to burn your hcl salts with an oven and it is impossible to burn them with a dehydrator.

given the thickness of the tar, id say rehydrate to a goop and bassify, pull with nps and salt out, that way you wont have any questions of it is safe or not

Alright Mew I'm going to take this advice. Best nps and acid for the job?

if you have d-limonene i prefer that, otherwise xylene does the job just fine.

i prefer d-limo because of its food safeness. when using xylene id only trust glass instead of plastics. if you have glass turkey baster/ pipette / consideration for pouring and evaporation, xylene will work just fine.

as for salt, if you want a nice powdery product id go with hcl. to salt with hcl make 1.5-2% solution. this is done by taking 33% muriatic acid (HCl) and mixing it with 2 parts water. then taking that entire solution and mixing it with 5 parts water.

so 20 ml of 33% hcl mixed with 40 ml of water makes 60 ml 11% hcl. mixed with 300 ml (5 x 60 ml) makes 360 ml salting solution.

youre muriatic acid will probably be 30-33% HCl


perform 4-6 salts and collect salts,
perform final separation (if using d-limo, filter through paper towel to collect random d-limo drops, rinse filter with water to retrieve alkaloids saturated to the paper towel)
evaporate and scrape/chop into powder
in a beaker/tube wash with dry acetone to remove contams/excess hcl
let dry after 2+ washes by rinsing washing vessel with water and emptying into dish to evaporate
collect salt
enjoy\
should be tan/brownish-grey

If I were to use something other than HCl, do you at all recommend drinking the salted solution instead of evaporating? When I last extracted mescaline, it was so underwhelming as compared to the only tea I've made, and I fear that this might be a similar scenario.

By the way, I originally set out to make the tea with HCl after having made a neutral pH tea from mimosa hostilis. I did not fully consider that the san pedro would be so difficult to dry out, however, as this is what thwarted my efforts.

Alright so for future reference, what acids are "food-safe" if you will that are an alternative to either acetic or citric acid and won't become perilously concentrated when reducing the tea?

Are you just making tea, or figuring on doing something fancier with it? I've read from several quite experienced folks that acid isn't necessary, and that it mostly just makes it taste worse. I'm currently making a 0 acid brew to test this. I'll get back to you.

I started with dried chips. Added enough water to cover, brewed for a couple/few hours, drained, put the cactus in the freezer to freeze. Repeating process 5 times.We'll see how it turns out, but so far looking just as good as any acidic tea I've made.

I am about to try making my first brew too, and was not planning on adding any type of acid

mesc is super hydrophilic and will dissolve in water at room temperature, acid or not. but for the sake of extraction, a little bit dosent hurt. a twist of a lemon does the trick

The addition of an acid certainly doesn't hurt things, but hydrochloric acid is not the acid for the job. I just want to reiterate that it does NOT evaporate during reduction because it is so hydrophilic. Unless complete dryness is achieved, there is HCl in the product. It is not necessarily unsafe to use, but you just have to know what you're doing. That being said, I've given it further consideration and as a home-based chemist, I think I will retire HCl brewing methods.