After reading here and there that keeping a cutting in the dark for a while increase mescaline content, i thought i could make a little experiment.

Process :
- Find a nice specimen like this little fellow named #P5. A T. Peruvianus started from seed, 2 years old 60cm tall :




- Take a cutting :



- Cut the tip to grow it and have a nice piece you can share in 2 almost identical bits :



- The sample will be extracted fresh after the cut :



- The test will be kept in a dark room rolled in a newspaper for 3 month :



- The test after 3 month. Amazing, it lost only 10% of its weight and it's ready to be extracted :



- Weight the result of each extraction :



- repeat with other specimens :





As an aside :
In order to get the ratio fresh weight/dry weight i did dry one of the cutting. It was Sample of #P3 :



Despined :



Cut in stars and drying :



Dry weight :



As you can see, dry matter if only 3,9% of the fresh weight but for future calculation i will take 5%.



Bunch of numbers:



The P# : Trichocereus Peruvianus started from seeds (between 2 and 3 years old).
The named (Katinka, Niño, Humberto) : cutting brought back from Peru and started to grow 2 years ago.

%fresh = ((extract)/(fresh weight))*100
%dry = (%fresh)/(5/100)
%3 month = ((extract)/(weight test+3 month))*100
gain in % =(((%dry test)/(%dry sample))*100)-100


Anecdotal evidence : Niño is the only one planted in the ground (shady area) and, so far, gave the best yield.


Any question is welcome.





Disclaimer : i'd like to think i have a scientist soul but in fact i lack rigor (e.g : i don't weight anything when i run an extraction) so all the results have to be taken with a grain of salt and if someone wants to run his own experiment, it's welcomed.

This is fantastic!

Great job good sir.

Your hard work and meticulous methodology is highly appreciated.

Thanks for doing a more rigorous test on an often speculated topic.

Did you note which part of the cactus you selected for the immediate vs the delayed extraction? Another topic I have not seen much rigorous work on potency vs age of growth.

I didn't pay attention of which part was extracted first, so it was random. So i checked pictures of all extraction i did and in fact i've always extracted the bottom first and the top was the delayed.

I will try to extract the same specimens in the future (in 1 or 2 years) to know if potency increase or not. Of course, only if i still take an interest in cactus extraction, you never know...

Thank you very much for this, beautiful

Ah ok thanks for checking. Since you seem to have a lot of data points at roughly half as potent or twice as potent I thought there might be another dominating effect that was uncorrelated with aging (possibly the newer vs older growth, but apparently not).

Do you have any idea how consistent your extractions are with the same material? I'm just trying to get an idea of how much variation you might have in an extraction in general to see how meaningful the variations in your trial results are.

keep up the good work!

WOW this is really cool!

It is so interesting that a few of the samples went down in potency after being in the dark. Any ideas on this?

Thank you for doing this work!

Superb to see some figures for this.

If only I'd made a quantitative comparison on the stems I brewed up after 2(?) years in the dark (or at least heavy shade). The brew was good though, and keeping them for 2 years meant 2 extra rounds of cuttings got made as well!

Oups, i realise that i forgot to mention a fact:
The P# : Trichocereus Peruvianus started from seeds (between 2 and 3 years old).
The named (Katinka, Niño, Humberto) : cutting brought back from Peru and started to grow 2 years ago.

iT doesn't allow any conclusion to be drawn but age could be a raison to explain the difference. Further experiments are needed.



This is definitly a weak point. As i mentionned in the disclaimer, i don't weight anything during extraction. Only the cactus flesh at the beginning and the mescaline extracted at the end. I just hope that after severals extractions (~40 times) i'm confident with my skills. I use a variation of Kash's tek(thanks a lot Kash !). The differences are mainly, blender, freeze&taw and the use of a pressure cooker, i'll prolly post the exact process with pics.
One bias could also be that as i don't check pH during salting, my extract is a mix of mescaline and other alkaloids and therefore it skews the final result. Even if when i purify the crude extract (with all extract combined) i don't have so much loss.


Edit : The extraction process in pics