Hello all! SWIM has scoured the forums for weeks looking for pertinent information regarding extraction of Phalaris arundinacea.
In his infinite curiosity, SWIM decided to make a completely hypothetical procedure for no reason.

SWIM used approximately 500-600 grams of plant matter ground up in a blender as well as possible. In the end, this turned out to look like wet mowed grass and was not completely liquid. Perhaps 20% remained relatively solid.

SWIM then went forward and acquired some additional items

1. 1 gallon of Xylol (Various isomers of xylene)

2. 900 grams of 100% NaOH

3. 500 mL of Heptane

4. 2 paint buckets

5. Muriatic acid (33% HCl)

6. Aluminum foil

7. Duct tape

8. Home made pH indicator, made from red cabbage and tested with Ammonia to validate accuracy (it worked)

9. 2 meter long stirring stick

SWIM's procedure

1. Create a solution of 600 grams of plant material and about 6000 mL of water to boot and soak for 48 hours.

2. Slowly pour in Muriatic acid along the walls of the bucket, taking care to avoid excess evolution of heat while stirring thoroughly.
pH indicator turns bright red to indicate a pH of less than four.
Let sit for 48 hours, mixing every 24 hours.

3. Slowly sift in tablets of NaOH, taking care to avoid excess evolution of heat while stirring thoroughly.
pH indicator turns bright green to indicate a pH of over 10.

4. Two liters of xylol are poured into the solution and the solution is stirred vigorously. A clear separation layer of xylol observed. The grass shavings appear green and prominently exhibit some semi-translucent, yellowish oily bubbles on the bottom of the interface layer when exposed to direct NaOH. This layer is directly on top of the semi-solid/liquid grass layer. Yet the NPS layer remains perfectly clear. These are initial observations within the first hour of mixing. Perhaps more time will give better results.

SWIM is now contemplating what to do next. If the xylene remains clear after 24 hours, does that necessarily mean that nothing was pulled into the NPS layer? Or perhaps only pure product? SWIM might add a one liter fully saturated NaCl/distilled water solution to help the non-polar stuff separate out into the NPS layer. Subsequently, SWIM would pull with turkey baster into a graduated cylinder and perform freeze or evaporatory recrystallization.

The pH is indicating that the solution is pretty darn basic, but perhaps I should add more lye? I am not a fan of wasting materials though.

Any light that may be shed on these issues would be greatly appreciated.

There's no point in adding HCl if you don't filter or defat before adding the NaOH. All that accomplishes is making some NaCl (table salt) in solution. That's not a bad thing, but it's cheaper to just add salt rather than HCl if that's what you want to accomplish.

2 liters of xylene sounds like an awful lot! I'd bet you could get by with a lot less. The xylene remaining clear is not a bad sign.

At this point I'd recommend pulling out the xylene, and salting out the alkaloids either as acetates (with vinegar) or as fumarates (with acetone or isopropyl alcohol saturated with fumaric acid) and see what you get.

At this point SWIM needs to look at what is in the xylene layer in a few hours.

If you do get anything and test it can you report back about how it went? I have been extracting from wild phalaris lately and testing every few weeks..so far I only got an orangy oily oxidish goo..when smoked it is active..I can def tell there is DMT in there..or meo or both, but there is something else in there as well that is stimulating and seems to last a few hours after i smoke it..it makes it unpleasant afterwords..its almost MDMA'ish, but I dont like that stimulation..It feels like a phen..and I am wonderiing if it may be hordenine.

There is all kinds of stuff in phalaris..I am using wild arundinacea..so far the full spectrum orange stuff is nothing like mimosa..it has a similar feeling at the start..but there is no visual breakthrough or anything..I only got very mild patterens on a white wall with very prominent tryptamine body effects, and some mental effects.

Phalris is worth doing some experiments with though becasue I think it will eventually be a great source of tryptamines once we have a tek that can seperate them from the gramine, hordenine and other alkaloids.

SWIM just extracted about 600 mL of the xylene from the tub into a Pyrex bowl and ended up with a nice bright yellow extract.

SWIM is now going to boil vinegar down to about 10% volume and add microwave dried (30 seconds) Epsom salts to the remaining acetic acid solution to dry it up and hopefully end up with pure acetic acid.

With the acetic acid SWIM is going to see if SWIM can salt any DMT out of the NPS extract. The good news is that there is definitely something in the xylene that can be extracted because the yellow color is very, very strong.

SWIM may be acquiring a combination hot plate / magnetic stirrer soon and real glassware so this works a bit better.

SWIM is also thinking about going back and acidifying the whole batch and straining it through a cotton t-shirt to defat and get rid of the super annoying solid matter that makes removal of the NPS extremely difficult. As Entropymancer pointed out, there is no reason to acidify and then basify if you aren't going to be removing the plant crap in between. SWIM thought that acidifying would destroy some of the cellular structures to assist in the DMT release, but SWIM is not completely positive this does anything that the base itself cannot.

For breaking open cells and organelles, repeated freeze-defrost cycles work well. A microwave may help with the defrosting. However, it would be very inconvenient to try that now. That's the kind of thing you ought to do before you even acidify.

For future reference, for people who have not already started the tek: you can run the grass through a food processor without adding water, and then freeze and unfreeze the mush a few times, and then add it to water and acidify. It may also work fine to run the un-shredded plant matter through the freeze-defrost cycles and then shred it without water in a food processor, or with water in a blender.

After acidifying the water, you could defat by pulling with NPS until it comes clean. Then basify and extract the alkaloids with fresh NPS.

Alternatively, if removing the NPS from a watery plant mush mixture gives problems, then you could just do pulls on the plant mush with acidified water. The cotton t-shirt method or cheesecloth method would work great here - strain the plant material out of the acidified water, and then use fresh acidified water for each new pull. After enough pulls (I don't know how many 'enough' is, perhaps 5), discard the plant solids. Defat the acidified water with NPS, then basify and pull the alkaloids with fresh NPS.

Just a heads up, don't use the products obtained from Phalaris arundinacea orally. It contains exceptionally high amounts of gramine, sometimes as high as 0.3%. Gramine is actually often the major alkaloid. That is way higher than in other tryptamine bearing grasses. The gramine is not likely to cause any harm when vaporized at low temperatures, as it does not melt before 138-139 C, compared to 40-59 C for DMT. But orally, it will at best give you an allergic reaction, at worst brain damage.

This also means that the product obtained from P. arundinacea never should be smoked in a pipe, joint or similar or vaporized in a VaporGenie. Only a vaporizer where you can set the temperature will be sufficient. At least for the time being, until we know more about gramine and if it survives the extraction.

Im starting to think fractional distillation may be a good way to deal with the gramine. Theres gotta be a good ghetto way to do it. getting rid of gramine is easy from the this angle

also, your not going to get the results you want out of that route to strong acetic acid. azeotropes....

According to the Merck Index, gramine is not soluble in naphtha. So if naphtha is used for extraction from phalaris, gramine should not be a problem unless the Merck Index is wrong.

I can check and find out the solubility for other solvents. I don't know whether or not it reports solubility for DCM, tolune, or xylene, but I'll try and remember to check for it.

Besides extracting in Naptha, is there another way to selectively precipitate out the Gramine as an insoluble salt? I believe that would be a slightly safer alternative than having to rely on the Merck index. I could have sworn that I saw a tek where a compound such as 5-Meo was salted out from n,n-DMT solution, leaving pure n,n-DMT which was later extracted and recrystallized. I cannot remember where I saw this though.

SWIM has not added the acetic acid yet. SWIM is still contemplating what to do because something just doesn't seem right...

Right now SWIM has a nice yellow xylene mixture sitting in the fridge...

Ooooh, really? That is great news! My notes about gramine solubility does not include naphtha: "Soluble in alcohol, ether, toluene and chloroform, slightly soluble in acetone and not soluble in water."


If you were to find this tek again, it would be of tremendous help!

So let's say that the DMT acetate successfully precipitates out of xylene solution with the addition of food-grade 5% acetic acid (clear Vinegar). DMT acetate is then in a solution with water with a xylene layer on top. The xylene layer is poured back into the extraction bucket for future pulls. We are left with a water / DMT acetate solution. Excess sodium carbonate is added to absorb the water and basify the solution to allow the DMT to freebase. This mash is then ground up thoroughly. Consequently, the freebase is liberated from the precipitate with the use of denatured alcohol.

SWIM believes he will end up with a layer of IPA and water, with the DMT freebase in the IPA. The IPA would then be extracted and dried to yield crystalline DMT.

Does this work?

SWIM has tried a few different methods and has learned some things along the way.

First, SWIM has had great difficulty separating IPA from a brine solution. He has never yielded pure IPA, evaporation of the product always leaves a salty residue. SWIM would suggest using 99% Methanol (Heet brand antifreeze) or dried Acetone. Both are relatively cheap and should work the same way as IPA. SWIM would personally recommend the Methanol.

When SWIM prepares his Phalaris he first blends it with water and a dash of vinegar. He then cooks the water and grass for an hour in a crock pot. After the hour is up filters out the water into a jug then adds fresh water to the crock pot and grass then cooks for 2 more hours.
After that he filters out the water and discards the grass. SWIM then reduces the acidic solution in the crock pot. It takes a few days to reduce to a thick liquid, which he pours into a dish and evaporates to a goo.

This 'Phalaris resin' is a nice way to scale down the extraction, half a pound of grass yields about 20g of resin. That reduction in volume means less base and NPS is used. Also a 300ml solution is a lot easier to work with than a few liters of acidic soup.

watch out with heet, i dont remember if its just the IPA variety, or what, but i have had some bottles of it of late that had a lot of lubes and whatnot in them. you can see it tho. The off brands like HEET are the best IMO, less additives.

definitely use the methanol or acetone, and dry them first.

then evap that to get your goodies, if there are problems with some ionic crap, rextalize from a NP solvent like naptha. that will surely leave any salts behind

mass "cake"/resin methods are definitely the way to go here.....