Hello, I am going to post the most info as a reply so I don't freak anyone out with the whole post immediately. It contains pictures and the (lengthy) write up. I appreciate that yields of over 11g from 200g Caapi is not normal and thus have issues. I would like some help in resolving and maybe cleaning what I have.

One thing to note, this process has gone on for four months now! Lots of settling and decant, settle etc. and this is where I ended up:

If someone can read, maybe identify my noob foolishnesses and help me get what I have edible and clean please!

tl/dr: I have gotten over 11g of dried powders from 200g caapi vine. It would be nice if they were all harmalas but I suspect there is something else, me being a noob at this. What is there I don't know and was hoping maybe someone could:

1. enlighten me as to possibilities/probabilities of what this powder is and
2. ultimately suggest a way to clean them if possible?

How did I get here?

Its a long process over the last 4 months!

Basically I have been following Gibran2's tek. I have only ever done harmalas from Rue before and got pretty good yields, some beautiful manske crystals and quite whitish powder.

So now I wanted to utilise some caapi I have had around for years!

Starting material: 200g hammered and hand shredded dried "yellow" caapi.

Boiled 3x with dash vinegar added each time for 45min and liquids reduced to about 800ml
Result a deep red liquid. Filtered through cotton then coffee filters.
Solids run through my blender to mash up further.
Boiled this again 2x for 45min with dash vinegar added each time.
Filtered again through cotton then coffee filter (much more difficult now and much more discarded residues)
Reduced second set of boils (4+5) to around 400ml. Also deep but clear red.

Acted separately from here on in on session 1 (1-3) and session 2 (4-5), thinking session 2 would be quicker to result and I would let session 1 settle longer in the meantime.

Basified both with around 100ml of 10g NaOH/100ml DH2O. Probably too much but I wasn't patient enough

Never went black with white precipitate like Gibran's pics - I have seen this with rue but never once saw this with the caapi. Always was a darkish clouded caramel liquid. Took over 3 days to see any signs of clearing at the top when the precipitate began making itself known.

Whenever I felt there was enough precipitate I would decant, save the liquid (still very cloudy) and then start the add DH2O and settle-decant-add DH2O etc until the supernate was relatively clear golden yellow. I was not in a hurry and did the first session like this over two weeks, always keeping the 'discard' liquid. The bottles of that started obviously proliferating!

After a few decants and add water I did the acidify step and decantered/filterd out the black stuff that dropped out. I then added some NaOH solution as before (maybe too much because of lack of waiting to notice the precipitation - I was expecting something immediate like rue but what happened here was it went cloudy then puffy precipitae stuff was only visible a little later) proceeded to do over 20 of these, letting it settle in between but was never able to get pH lower than 12.

I thought I would add a bit of vinegar to the mix to hasten the drop in pH. Big mistake! The precipitate disappeared and I got black fallout again. It was basically a redo of the acidifcation step!

So - after filtering the black stuff of the cloudy red liquid I add NaOH again, little more carefully as now I knew what to expect. Again, settle, decant and add DH2O. Many times, pH never lower than 10. Each of these steps takes essentially a day. Eventually I give up and dry it.

First result: 3.2g of powder! Wow. Much more yield than expected (I am expecting around 2% from what I have read)

Okay, so imagine what the first 3 boils will deliver!

Meantime, my bottle collection is growing and stuff is still falling out of the "discarded" liquids. I keep siphoning it out and consolidating it. After 3 weeks I go through the process again with this collection (session 2: part 2). Did the acidification twice again. Each time I got fallout so I assume the cleaning step is not good. Never do I get it as white as Gibrans pics.

Anyway, ends up another 1.6g dried, slightly darker this time.

So now I go back to session 1, expecting serious amounts of powder here!

Now, I don't know what went wrong but I ended up with almost nothing!! What I did get was a dark, almost black shiny powder. less than 2g. Most disappointing. Feels like I dried the stuff that the acid step dropped out, but I know it wasnt! For certain. I was ultra careful with this as I expected it to be the primo yield.

Sadly I moved on.

Bottles and bottles of cloudy dark yellow liquids from all sessions...I just left them until they were pretty clear and again consolidated the precipitate and left the liquids to keep settling.

After over 3 months of this (exclusively "discarded" liquids) I go through the clean and dry phases again and reap 6.18g of powder. This time some very white and most this sort of grey tan color.

So now I have well over 11g of powder, excluding the weird shiny black stuff.

And there is still stuff coming out from the discard liquids!!

What the heck do I have here? NaOH? Harmalas? Other alkaloids? Any idea? Can I clean what I have?

Pics follow now.

Did a manske once on a caapi extract (which is very unusual to do) and lost 50% weight. What was the rest? I don't know. You could consider doing a manske also.

Thanks Jees, would the manske not remove all the THH harmalas from the mix? I think I read that's a likely result here somewhere. I was hoping the caapi harmalas would have a different 'flavour' due to that as I have previously been doing this with rue (with manske) so I have stock of that.

Would this powder dissolve in acid again and I then precipitate with a less stronger or more edible base like Na2CO3 to get rid of any NaOH that may still be in the mix?

People here have been able to manske near pure THH, but the conditions were not a mix of harmalas where THH is a lesser part. So in your case, I don't know for sure.

It's believed the THH forms trough prolonged boiling, your boiling times are on the short end compared to traditionalists, so I don't know if you really have a lot of THH like found in traditional brews.

This is what I much recommend. Also, you don't need to wash with DH2O as much if your last base was NaCO3, just once is already enough. Spores of residual NaCO3 are no concern. I've also found the extract stays more protected against oxidation after a NaCO3 base, it always kept more pale over time. With NaOH as a last base it turned much easier red-ish as a stash over time. This is a loose observation only.

***

Personally I keep doing acid/base transitions until in the acid stage nothing falls out anymore, and this acid liquid goes trough a coffee filter swiftly, even after poring 5 times trough same coffee filter (it get finer each time). You might need to warm the acid stage a bit to get most dissolved again and give it time like over a day. This I found to be true for rue, it's been a very long time since extracting caapi.
Since you likely have a lot of impurities(?) this might be worth exploring, THH would survive it, I don't mind going over 5 or more A/B transitions to get things clearer.

Thanks Jees.

I happened to have another beaker with everything in the acid phase so instead of using NaOH I tried the Na2CO3. I added quite a bit again (about 1/3 as much liuid in Na2CO3 solution) as nothing seemed to happen and the liquid remained clear. Definitely wasnt the same result as the NaOH. At the moment it has been sitting for over 4 hours and the solution is a light yellow and slightly cloudy. But nothing visible dropping out. Other than it all going a light yellow and then clouding a bit there was no other reaction visible - ie no alkaloids seem present unless they are superfine and going to take forever to precipitate. The pH is around 12 now.

Is this normal? Before I dissolve all the powders back in acid again I just want to be sure that this is what should be expected. As I said, its really completely different to the NaOH and nowhere close to anything in gibran's tek

Precipitations listen to pH, so if you have pH 12 then all alkaloids should precipitate. Overnight should be enough to collect at the bottom. Keep us informed...

PS: Forgot to say: I don't like to poor a carbonate in an acid because of the sizzling and CO2 production. Neutralizing first with NaOH till 7 and then adding NaCO3 to raise further.

OK: an update. I was pretty worried when there was no real noticeable fallout like before to be honest! But after a good 24 hours resting there was this super fine layer of almost imperceptible whitish precipitate on the bottom, and the liquid had cleared a lot but not totally. I siphoned that off till near the bottom to settle some more and swirled the remaining liquid to re-suspend the precipitate and then dried it. Results attached.

Much better than I expected in amount from looking at the precipitate in the beaker. Hope its not all sodium carbonate now! I did it before I read about the fizzing in your post so I'm afraid that's what happened. Hopefully thats not really an issue? Will do the NaOH neutralise first next time.

Left with a very clean whitish powder, even tho its still got to dry some more. Some of the lighter frothy crystals make me think of the Na2CO3? But beautiful light caramel color if viewed from bottom of evap dish.

What do you think? I reckon this little trial gives me confidence to bang the other 10g of whatever I got into vinegar again and do the same as you suggested.

Here's a closer pic of the drying crystals. Definitely looks like two different substances? If there is some Na2CO3 precipitation, how would one wash it away?

Did you throw in powder NaCO3?
Most people make a deep saturated solution of NaCO3 in water first and poor that liquid in as a base, this way one is fairly sure that absolute neglectable hard NaCO3 will be in the end product.

If hard NaCO3 is in the yield, you could wash it with water but I'm not sure if that's going to take it all out. I don't know tbh, never did that or needed to. If you're afraid that it could be a lot of hard NaCO3, I would do one more acid/base step and using a saturated liquid to base further with.

Note: if there is a little alkaloids in a huge amount of liquid, this has more trouble to precipitate compared when the same amount of alkaloids was in a much smaller amount of liquid, the molecules have to 'find' each other to make crystals.

Happy trials

No, the Na2CO3 was in DH2O solution and there is zero precipitation in the bottle of solution. It was done at room temp (which is on the cool side at the moment it being winter here) and just shaken vigorously till mixed.

I have scraped it all up and the net effect now is a powder very similar in colour to my rue haramalas which are definitely clean and active at predictable doses. I think as it dried it got whiter and whiter and there was less difference than in the pic above. (total powder 6.2g which does seem too much again!)

Thanks - the amount of liquid does explain the long wait there!

I will do the next one starting with a known amount of my 'dirty' harmalas and run through the same procedure using a lot less liquid.

Another update. Did 5 base-acid-filter-base- rounds on the last batch of raw precipitates. Last round there was pretty much nothing in the filter paper which had been going from granular black stuff to darker caramel grains left in the filter each time. At pH 11-ish I washed the precipitate with DH2O and then dried it. Much more homogeneous overall color now and very white with a slight tan tinge and when powdered identical to the rue harmalas (which went through quite a few water washes and at least 4 manske rounds). The dried powder is also very easy to scrape up and flakes loose from the glass with hardly any effort at all.

Hope I'm getting somewhere.

I am currently working on a known weight of 'dirty' extract from previous to see if I can improve it. If that works out well I have over 10g more of that to process.

Also I took some of the 'vinegar' I am using and pushed the pH up to 11 with the same Na2CO3 solution I have been using and after almost 48 hours there is zero precipitation. So I am hoping that this points to there NOT being Na2CO3 in the dried powder? Don't know if that's a valid logic test?

Anyway, its all looking rather nice and clean and I'm not losing as much as I thought in the process. When I finish the round of 'dirty' extract I will know a bit more specifically how much gets "lost".

I think you're set
Keep up the good works.

Oops, I think that last bit of logic is flawed unfortunately. I focussed on precipitate but I think the problem is that the last stage involves drying and evaporation so any Na2CO3 in the solution will also be left behind. I think that's why I'm still getting too much. When I repeated that test with drying (given that the solution was still quite saturated) I got plenty Na2O3 dried out.

So I guess the next thing is how to get rid of that? I thought the water 'wash' (dilute-decant-dilute-decant) would diminish the amount of NaOH/Na2CO3 in that solution with every cycle? How many does it take to make the amount negligible? I suppose that depends on the solution strength (saturated) - unfortunately the pH isn't helping me decide here as it stays pretty much put.

Some things I don't understand in gibran's tek:

1. He says only a couple of washes will do to get it back to 7-8pH. Yet after even 12 x ~1 litre dilute-decant cycles I can hardly move the pH. Surely the NaOH/Na2CO3 is getting more and more negligible each time?
2. If the pH gets to 7-8 won't all the harmala precips go back into solution?

Now, if I add DH2O to the existing powder yields to try and clean out the Na2CO3 etc will the harmalas dissolve or stay behind?

OK, well it all went disastrous pretty quickly and I have no idea why! I guess gibran's tek is not for people like me. For some reason it never ever went as he described and my results never matched his pictures. We must have completely different kinds of caapi.

Anyway this is what happened:

I took 5g of the 'dirty' precipitate (dried) and dissolved it back into acidic water pH 4-ish. I mixed and let a huge amount of dense dark matter precipitate - almost 50% (as always - even though it has been acid-base cleaned through 4 cycles before this) - and a dark yellow liquid.

Decanted and filtered this, discarding the black stuff and then raised pH to ~8 with NaOH solution and to ~11 with reasonably saturated sodium carbonate solution.

Left to settle, decanted and added distilled water. Repeated this step about 5 times (up to 800ml+ DH2O added every time). Whitish cloudy precipitate settled faster and faster, lighter every time. Decanted/siphoned as much liquid as possible off.

Added a bit of vinegar/DH2O to pH ~4-5

Again, settled, decanted and filtered off yet more dark black matter. Quite a substantial amount, especially considering gibran only ever did this step once!

NaOH to ~pH8 and Na2CO3 to ~11. Did the settle, decant, add DH2O, settle...10x. Never once did the pH change by one point ever in this cycle even though the supernate water is super clear!

Decanted and siphoned as much water off as possible then dried.

Left with less than 1g of the same weird crunchy black powder I got earlier along with less than .05g of tan powder mixed in. So basically the entire cloud of precipitate just vanished on evaporation.

Its hard to believe that that 5g of 'dirty' was just a pile of nothing but I just have have the knowledge to understand what happened. I thought at worst I had harmalas and they were contaminated by some NaOH and some Na2CO3 but it seems that was not the case and everything I had "extracted" was just the crap that filtered out in the acidic water.

I have about 3g+ of that same powder - wondering if there is an alternative way to clean it of NaOH and Na2CO3 other than following the same failure route as above, or just give up and stick to the rue extractions which I have zero trouble with and the teks match identically to my experience.

Pretty damn bummed to be honest!

p.s. yellow in pics is exaggerated due to lighting, colors in base are more 'light tan' than yellow

Hmm I feel for you, but frustration and errors are part of the path no doubt.

Bunk wood could be, do you have an idea of wood quality?

When doing first re-dissolving in acid I expect a lot of gunk, also with rue, this I would not call a sign of anomalies. I know it looks worrisome sometimes but then again there should be some yield at the long end.
On acidification to pH 4 you have a massive precipitation too. I've found a pot like that must stand for a while, usually I continue next day. Often combined with phases of heating to I-can-touch-it and stirring/shaking. This to re-dissolve all alkaloids in the acid. Then cool down to filter & base again.
Sometimes FB dissolves very fast in acid, but sometimes (when there is gunk involved) I give it much more effort. I don't know how much time (or warming) you gave it in the acid stage. I'm not saying this is your golden ticket, just searching for spots off potential loss.

Also when the concentration of alks is low then it has more trouble precipitating under elevated pH.

Thanks Jees, no I didn't heat the acid/vinegar except for the very first time I dissolved the powder. But I have let it precipitate at least 12-24 hours at a time.

No idea about the bark unfortunately so that could be it. Just wondering what the heck that pile of 'dirty' powder is then!

After reading the VDS thread (partially - way too dense for me!) I tried to 'clean' another batch of 1.5g of the same powder by 'washing' it in water made basic by ammonia solution and then evaporating that. I have no idea if this is a valid solution but was seeing the ammonia as something that would definitely no longer be present when everything dried like NaOH and Na2CO3.

Was left with a grey-tan colored powder but then not sure what it is! Tastes slightly bitter but nothing like the rue extracts.

Under high pH I am having the opposite problem - I'm getting lots of precipitation! Just that last batch disappeared on evaporation (kinda like what happened to the first sessions of boils earlier)

12-24 hours is sure enough for an acidic state to settle gunk out. Yet initially I shake the hell out of it (and sometimes that warming too) to make sure no alks forgot to dissolve.
Some people might find it a strange remark to give alks shake and time to redissolve in pH 3, but especially those alks coming from a scraped coffee filter have shown some reluctance to re-dissolve. Then, only time + shaking + some warmth is needed, at least in my experience so far.

Do you have a blacklight?
Dissolve some in acidic water and see if it glows, glowing = harmalas.
It takes very little (even trace amounts) to make it glow so it is not a quantitative test but to see if it glows at all. It should.

Yes! I have used the blacklight constantly and always the solutions have glowed like crazy. My hands and kitchen are a mess from this when viewed in blacklight - it takes forever to come out the fingernail edges! This is why I have pursued this for months now. I have a bit more rue experience and was pretty sure everything was going according to plan! I am totally lost here and cannot believe that big pile of powder didn't contain a lot of harmalas.

Most frustrating because I have no idea anymore whats going on! I believe just from the blacklight that the bark is fine, and often the liquids have that lumo tinge to them that is so familiar from the rue.

Even now I have some precipitate (still from the original settling) sitting in dark red acid water and just checked that and sure as heck its glowing that greeny blue glow.

If you have still everything potential alk containing:
just to try: redissolve in vinegar 3 to 4 , shake, warm, shake, you know, then 24 hr settle, filter if necessary, and then try ammonia as a base all the way. There is a distinct difference using that base, I can't point to it scientifically, but it's a household cleaning agent in my simple eyes and lo and behold I find it precipitates 'cleaner'