Hello Fellow Cactus Lovers! I wanted to share details of my recent experience using a pressure cooker to prepare cactus. Sorry for the English units, my backwards country hasn't converted to metric yet.

Preparation (dose for two people):
10.3 pounds of fresh trichocereus pachanoi (about six feet of a known weak variety, 2-4" diameter) was washed, chopped into stars about 1/2" thick, and placed in a 21.5 quart aluminum pressure cooker (PC) with 2 gallons of filtered tap water. This volume of water was enough to submerge all the cactus stars by a couple inches, and was a little more than half of the PC working volume. A large outdoor propane burner brought this to a boil with the lid off, and continued for about 15 minutes until the foaming stopped, then the lid was secured and cooking continued at 15 psi (250 degrees F) for about 30 minutes. After cooling, the water was poured out through a colander into a container and set aside. The cactus is put back into the PC with 2 more gallons of water and cooked for 20 minutes at 15 psi. Liquid is again removed and saved. Using just my fingernails, the now softened cacti is easily skinned to expose the still bitter green flesh just below the waterproof outer layer. The cactus and skin are added back to the PC with 1.5 gallons of water and the juice of 2 lemons for a final cook at 15 psi for 30 minutes. Once cooled, the mildly pulverized cacti flesh is removed from the water by straining through a t-shirt. I note the cactus flesh is no longer bitter, indicating most of the alkaloids have been removed. The water from the 3 batches is combined and rapidly boiled down to 2 half pints of dark brown liquid having the consistency of maple syrup, but not the taste. These two doses are placed in the refrigerator over night.

The lovely experience lasted 17 hours and will be detailed later. It did have a very heavy body load and headache associated with it, enough that it got me thinking about what teks could be used to extract the mescaline from the concentrated liquid? Any suggestions?

The entire cooking operation took about 10 hours, which will be shortened somewhat next time by preheating the water while washing and chopping the cactus, having more containers on hand to store the 4 gallons of water generated by the first two boils, and ensuring there is enough propane in the tank to avoid having to resupply during the middle of a cook. Also, I will slice the cactus vertically into strips around the core rather than stars so it will be easier to skin. Note that skinning the cactus after the first or second boiling is far easier than when fresh.

Good cactus loving to all of you!

I can't believe no one bothered to leave a comment. This is great information.
Have you tried this method with already powdered cactus as well? Thanks for the write-up!

Using a pressure cooker is my standard tek, pretty much as outlined. I tend to like the resulting syrup better than an extract but my cleanest, best extracts were when using syrup as the starting point. Extracting from fresh is just so much messier and so much more solvent volume.

Standard STB/xylene/HCl salt tek works well on syrup.

Sounds like the backberg clone, I always got absurdly heavy body load from that stuff.
The backberg or 'PC' clone seems to be mostly lacking a key enzyme for converting DMPEA into mescaline. Its a shame we dont yet have a tek to separate the two alkaloids in gram quantities, we could salvage the little bit of mescaline and feed the DMPEA to a different cactus that knows what to do with it.

Staring at the 30 kilos of good strength cactus I have waiting for extraction I wish I had the OPs giant pressure cooker

Patience prevails again, thanks for the replies!

hexagonal, I think powdered material would be harder to deal with in a PC due to foaming pushing the little particles into the pressure relief valve . For dried powder I'd go to one of the other teks. I've tried the 69Ron limonene tek with moderate success, though my lab and procedures are too primitive to get the beautiful crystals displayed on many a mouth watering post here. Dried chips should work well in a PC.

pinkoyd, I've had that HCl extraction in mind, just haven't pursued it, yet. I have some cacti growing that should be higher potency than my vast forest of weak pachanoi, and I plan to use a pressure cook extraction with no further refinement to test them out (after they have been harvested and stored in the dark for 3 months!). Using only water as the extraction medium continues to be my favorite method - it feels healthier and more natural.

Elrik, your post is trending in the direction I'm asking, so I'll be more specific. What I'm wondering is, can the plant compounds which cause such a high body load (what are they? Are they the DMPEA you refer to?) be removed through a "garage tek," or are they too closely related to mescaline to be separated by a standard tek?

Writing all this reminds me how much I love mescaline! Need more!

Interesting ive got a Stainless steel PC I wonder If it would be fine aswell?

Stainless steel will be fine.

Stainless steel's corrosion resistance makes it better than aluminium when extracting in an acidic medium. It's far better not to have aluminium dissolved into your plant extract.

Aluminium beats steel in terms of thermal conductivity, though, which means you'd be needing less gas/electricity per extraction (probably).

(The extraction detailed here should be OK in an aluminium PC because it doesn't use additional acid.)