This WAS going to be a reduced bark tea style A/B tek, but for this low amount it proved to be rather a nuisance. This will now be a standard A/B of 50g of bark in a 2 liter wine bottle. An acidic soak of 600ml of water with 30ml of vinegar added and about an hour and a half boil, then based with 120g of lye and currently pulling with 4 60ml lots of naptha.

Previous results STB with this batch of bark yielded only 0.5%, let's compare them to this as we go.

Result:

Sounds like a neat little plan Orion...

With 300ml to work with:
I would 'suggest' adding 50ml of white vinegar (already diluted @ 5% straight out of the bottle) to acidify.
Soak
Add 20g Saline (optional)
Add 25g lye (in solution) to base (should go very dark).
Soak
Then pull

The amount of vinegar shouldn't be a huge deal. For example...in the THP experiment using caapi, when I added 15ml of 5% vinegar to 1000l of water, the efficiency of the extraction jumped significantly (compared to non-acidified water) and excess acid failed to extract anything additional.

Cool, yeah I forgot about a lil bit of salt. Since I'm boiling 3 times in 350ml would I add salt and vinegar to all 3 boils or just the first ? So that would be nearly 150ml of vinegar and 60g of salt? Or split the 20g of salt and 50ml vinegar between the 3 boils ?

So for nearly 1 litre of end liquid:
say:
60ml Vinegar to acidify (20ml for each boil and strain)
add a touch more when you've collated the boils as some may have evapped.
30-50g of Salt (in solution)
50g Lye (in solution) to base...
Then pull



If you are going to reduce all your boils down to 300ml
then:
Add a lil bit vinegar to acidify
20g Saline
25-35g lye solution to base
Pull

also using vitamin C (ascorbic acid) greatly reduced the funky smell of my soaking/reductions... don't know if that is an option but i was really happy to learn about that.

After the first hour boiling at 350ml with 20ml vinegar I seem to have lost far too much liquid to evaporation. Even with the lid on there was only around 100ml of a thick dark soup left along with the very hydrated bark holding about the same amount. I'll count this as a hydration step and I will make sure I have completely hydrated bark before boiling next time. I have added 600ml to this extra 10 ml of vinegar. Color has returned to dark reddish as it had when I first added the vinegar.

Edit: clearly filtration is going to need an extra settle as it clogs rather quickly, adding an extra nights settling in the fridge onto this tek. Unfortunately for such a small amount of bark, this afford less conveniences than anticipated, which is a shame...

...HOWEVER, let's make SOME use of this.

Previously with this same batch of bark I have yielded only just over 0.5% (525mg from 100g) from an STB, which is a lot lower than I normally get (usually about 1.1%). I will keep the bark in the solution and we shall have a comparison of A/B vs STB on the same batch of MHRB.

Attached pics of first pull and extraction vessel. Soup seems to separate more readily than all of my STBs did.

Note the thin stem of the wine bottle- it makes pulling very quick and easy with a syringe.
Also check out the first 60ml pull, very saturated, I'm quite surprised to see this coming from 2 liters containing only 50g of bark.

This is for a Mimosa Extraction if I'm not mistaken...not Acacia...
Also the Saturation of the first pull is most likely down to the Salt addition.

sorry, i misread and deleted. also i was drunk posting which i never do, i had a rare whiskey and it went to my head.

I'm slightly pish right now too mailorderdiety..., but I gotta say, I can see much more xtal than expected with this method... results of precip soon... hexane re-x later...

Just under 1.8%. 0.886g from 50g, looks like it's mostly crystal too... not bad a/b... not bad...

We'll see what the full yield is after re-x including a solvent wash on the stuff I couldn't scrape out of the dish.

yeah this is my experience with acacia... extracting with water seems to work just as well. when i do add vinegar it is a minute amount and I don't think its that neccesary

I'm super stoked! i simply used non-smelling ascorbic acid.... so all you smell is bark boiling, no nasty vinegar. and i got a tremendous yeild. i have seen the other side and you will be more than satisfied with the results from this tek, without using vinegar.

0.457 here, looks like some tasty smoalk. Still a little bit more goo to recrystallize and tally up, it's being a little stubborn.

gorgeous orion

When doing an A/B on mimosa, try without boiling the acid extraction...
If the temps stay below 50°C, the mimosa powder won't get sticky and is really easy to filter, then you get much less emulsions and the whole process gets much smoother... I usually soak the bark for half an hour per pull, and I pull until the color of the liquid is significantly paler. (my last A/B extraction on 500g yielded some 10L before reduction, final yield was more than 1.5% very white spice.)
You might as well like to do at least 1 or 2 defats with your NP solvent of choice.
But indeed, an A/B is a lot of work for 50g of MHRB.

Interesting experience, thanks for sharing

616 of clean spice now, plus other stuff I will scrape into changa.. I think I have found what I was looking for. 525mg total from 100g of this bark (poor I know, far below my average), VS 616 plus very active goo from only 50g A/B on the very same batch of bark?
That's over twice the effectiveness including uncrystalized precipitate.

Silly(C)One, sure thing. I'm glad I kept the bark in on this one, but for larger extractions I can see why it makes sense to filter out the material and reduce it to a manageable amount as a tea.

Quite pleased with these results.

Lovely xtals...

Nice work, Orion!

After my first A/B, I never did another STB ever again. It is more effort, but so much less liquid to work with compared to STB's. Specially when extracting from shredded bark