Hey all, I am 2 1/2 hours into drinking my first tea. I was going to do an extract, but an occasion to go out in the woods with the tea arose instead. So here I am. Mild effects so far. Body buzz but no visuals. I boiled 2 12 inch thick cuttings. My friend and I have split the tea. He just barfed. No nausea for me. Be back later...😉

Have a wonderful night Metta!!

Thanks tony. You da man

Anyway, it’s been 6 hours since ingestion. Definitely on the threshold realm. I could have handled more for sure, but this was a good enough jumping off point. Great body buzz this whole time, just a little disappointed with the lack of visual/psychedelic effects. I actually wish my jar of spice in the freezer was crashed and dry so I could layer some of that over the top. But such is life. Can’t wait to work with this plant again. And oh god what a taste that tea was 🤢. Kinda followed suit of something I read earlier with chasing each gulp with a wedge of grapefruit. Definitely helped as a chaser. Much love all.

I will be back sir Pedro 🌵

Wow. So that was an all nighter. Amazing how long lasting that stuff is. I drank at 4 pm and didn’t fall asleep until 4 am. Very interesting the plateau this stuff has. Wherever you dose yourself to, it will hold that for hours. It was a mild buzz, but it was the same mild from about 630pm on. I can’t wait to go deeper in the future. Wonderful plant.

FYI- definitely something that will be boiled outside on a fire next time. The cooking tea made my wife gag when she got up from a nap. She had to walk through the kitchen with a shirt over her face. Very weird smell. I didn’t mind it to much, but I’m weird to!

Glad you had a pleasant introduction to the experience man-- let me share my recipe for making the tea far more palatable.

Firstly, just to say it, it's helpful to filter the liquid at least once after your boil but before reducing-- this will remove a lot of the slimy gunk that can make your stomach feel funky.
I only use a fine mesh gold coffee filter for this-- anything paper will not let the viscous liquid through very well. Some people use a cotton tee-shirt which works as well.

Once you have reduced your tea (I aim for a pint or less total) then I'll let it settle on the counter at room temp for a day or so if I'm not ready to drink immediately, then place in the fridge if I'm still not ready to consume.

When it's time to drink, I boil a couple grams of Mexican Tarragon herb for about 30 minutes, which is a common admixture to cactus tea (look up Cimora brews). It tastes amazing with cactus, and mitigates the bad flavor considerably.

Filter/remove the herb from the MT tea, and then reduce it until it's concentrated down to ~50-75ml. It may be a little syrupy depending on how strong you made it.

I then make a very strong, dense chemex of coffee-- stronger the better, of about 3 cups (1.5 pints)

In my drinking vessel, which is usually a quart mason, I place my three ingredients, always save the cactus tea for last, and as I pour it in, I take care to leave the dense bottom layer of sediment that has settled out of the tea in the cup, which helps a LOT on the taste/stomach discomfort.

I usually end up with about 2/3--3/4 quart of total liquid to drink, and with the combined ingredients (you can add the coffee to taste, I usually save a cup of coffee for after to drink as I come up over the next 2 hours) it really actually tastes good.

Preparing it this way has eliminated almost all of the nausea and stomach sourness that I experience-- and the volume can be slammed in a couple of minutes or slowly drunk over a half hour or so depending on your intention.

The only time I have felt uncomfortable drinking cactus this way was when I let the concoction cool too much, which brings out the cactus taste more prominently-- so keep it hot for best results.

I will surely try these tricks next time. Thanks coastal

Do you have any perspective on the following; I froze/thawed the diced cactus 3 times, and boiled for 3 1/2 hours. And when it came to drinking, there was a total of 300ml of liquid per person after adding a little honey and maple syrup. This was spaced into 3 doses over about an hour and a half. Would any of this contributed to a weaker experience. I would have thought a 12 inch good size cutting each would have been strong enough.

Well, since we're dealing with plants and not weighed extracts, it's always kind-of a dice roll on strength of any given plant. The only way to know if you have a potent cutting is to eat it, and note the results. If it's strong, you pup/clone/graft the shit out of the base, and duplicate it.

That said, 1 foot of Bridgesii is usually strong, but Pach is wildly variable.

Personally I definitely wouldn't have strung out the administration over 90 minutes for that light of a dose-- that most surely contributed to the weakness of the trip. Also, I would wonder how effective the 3.5 hour boil was, but as others have said, it might have been just fine-- there's really no way to know because that plant is gone.

It takes awhile to metabolize the alks anyway, but if you figure nearly an hour to begin hitting your system, the three would have overlapped with the complete amount for a shorter time-- this caution would make sense if you were dosing a known strong cutting, but as a foot of Pach is generally pretty modest, even for regular bridge I'd have taken it all at one sitting as mentioned above.

It's always a challenge to know what you're in for until you've tried it-- erring on the side of caution is never bad, but it can result in weak experiences-- as you have found. You could try this with a Bridge cutting (or an unusually strong pach) and find that 8" would have layed you out in cosmic-ass-kicking territory for 13 hours. Don't be sorry, hehe-- it's a part of the experience to have weak plants involved.

I have a 16" hybrid Pach/Peru and a ~1 foot cutting of a etiolated bridge that I combined together over the weekend-- it's in my fridge now, reduced to about 200ml (half pint or so) of thick brown syrup. I boiled it with a touch of vinegar for 24 hours continuously.

I'll use my listed prep method with it, and will take it all within 30 minutes.

I am confident in doing this because I have used 3 identical cuttings of the same hybrid before, and found that 2 segments was strong, one was mild, therefore the 16" hybrid + the foot of 1.5" etiolated bridge tip will get me somewhere between the other two experiences.

I love the duration of cactus, how it keeps rocking all night long into the AM (I almost always drink early evening). I don't add anything to my tea, just some lime juice while doing the cook. Larger dose and moar potent material will bring about more of the psychedelic effects you are looking for. I've never gotten tryptamine level visuals (like from a strong mushroom or lsd trip) even on stronger doses of cactus. And I'm OK with that. There are other things about the plant which more than make up for the lack of visual fireworks.

I've had insane "living vortex" visuals, where what seemed like black galaxy swirls would appear in any blank space-- floor, sky, walls, moving like they were the water comprising reality swirling down a drain into another plane-- all wood-grain surfaces were moving-- ebbing and flowing, morphing into and out of coherent shapes.

Trees and clouds were living in a completely unique way-- nothing like I've seen with shrooms or DMT-- my face in the mirror was breathtaking-- morphing from a child-state to old age faster then slowly--

I've had experienced with and without the MDMA-like erotic physical energy, seems that bridges are more prone to that.

The visuals are powerful when you get up in dose-- that's for sure

I definitely had a warm blanket kinda mdma feeling. But not even those low dose mushroom swirly visuals. I got a little trippy visual effect very late into the experience, about 2 hours after I ate 5 hbwr seeds. Nice synergy. Next time I will surely drink the whole dose at once. And I will boil much longer. My goal was to make an extract, but after reading a lot about the full spectrum of tea or resin feeling a little more “complete”, I went with the tea. Excited to be learning this new plant and molecule.

It's mostly CEV's with mescaline until you get to the high(er) doses. I gauge a low to mid experience by how vivid and colorful the CEV's are. The stronger the dose the more elaborate the visuals and the more colors you will see at any one time.

At mid to higher doses the open eye visuals get cooking with lots of stretching, crawling and breathing of inanimate objects. There's a certain level of mescaline where the whole room just comes alive with movement. At higher doses I can hardly close my eyes to check out the CEV's.

Try Bridgesii next time. It always delivers. A good representative experience starts with about 400 grs fresh material brewed up. You don't have to go to much trouble, just de-spine, blender, simmer until the foam turns to liquid, filter with a shirt and chug it, although freeze/thawing and longer boiling can help too. I would guess this would compare to a 350-400mg purer mescaline experience.

Metta-Morpheus do you know the species or clone name of the cactus that you used? I have had similar threshold-level experiences with PC and with a Peruvianus clone that is on the weak side. But with Bridgesii or non-PC Pachanoi or Scopulicola I would expect greater effects.

I also agree with Coastal that brewing for a longer time is a good idea. I used to brew tea for 4 or 5 hours. But now I brew for 12 to 14 hours. There is a noticeable increase in potency from the extended brewing time. If logistics allowed me to brew for longer than 12 to 14 hours I would, but realistically 12 to 14 is the maximum time that I am able to dedicate to one brew.

The thing about these cacti is that its really important to start out with the highest quality cuttings possible. The fattest cuttings you can find, from the biggest, oldest plants. Bridgesii, non-PC Pachanoi, and Scopulicola are your best bets.

All the best with your future journeys!

Thanks for all your help and replies you lovely cactiphiles. I will look to your guidance in my future cacti endeavors. I have 2 more cuttings, about 12 inches each, and one is real fat. Plus I kept the squeezed cactus pulp from first tea in the freezer that I was gonna throw in with it. I will drink the whole tea myself next time, maybe spread over two doses. Also, I did not despine before slicing up. What is the significance of this?

It doesn't matter whether or not you remove the spines or the clear skin. Neither have any effect on the potency. Use the whole cutting, white flesh and all. I've never frozen a cutting before.

De-spining makes it easier to cut up and filet out the green stuff, but that's mostly for cactus with gnarly spines in the first place, like Bridgesii, Peruvianus or Terscheckii. Sometimes I just chop it up and throw it in the blender without doing that. Short-spined cactus it's not worth the trouble to de-spine.

And yes, use the whole cactus if you have room in the pot. When I don't I just use the green flesh.

That’s what I did, sliced into stars without removing spines, sliced into 1/4 inch stars, and in the pot they went. I wasn’t sure if the spines had something toxic that would add to nausea or something.

Next time try to cut the slices thinner than 1/4 inch. If you first split the cutting in half vertically from top to bottom, then you can place the 2 halves cut side up and easily slice very thin half stars. The thinner the better, but no thicker than 1/8 inch if possible.

Next time cook the tea for longer. And make sure you're using the fattest, highest quality cuttings you can find. Store the cuttings in a closet for a month. Add the juice from a lemon or lime to the tea while it brews. Maybe try to up the dose to 18" per person.

It can be confusing at first. But once you get the hang of it you'll be brewing strong tea consistently. Remember, it all starts with using the very best cuttings possible.

Best luck!

Hello Metta-Morpheus, glad you got to experience the joy that even a small mescaline dose can give, it's my favorite molecule of all, and does have much more to offer. I find it to be pattern enhancing (wood grain comes alive, etc.) at low doses, and pretty solidly visual at higher doses when fractal structures appear in a blank sky and objects lying on the ground seeming to float at waist level (and the closed eye visuals are even better!).

Forgive me if I misread your post or am making an assumption, but in your preparation, are you freezing the cactus, then boiling for 3 1/2 hours, then freezing the collected solids, boiling again, and repeating for 3 freezing cycles, followed by reducing the three batches to a drinkable, if not palatable, amount?

Hello to you CS.

What I did was slice the two 12” cuttings into about 1/4 inch stars, and put these into freezer bags in a bowl, and froze, thawed and repeated 3 times. I the took the mostly thawed slices of the last freeze, and then boiled for 3 1/2 hours, and reduced down to about 600 ml. I have the cactus pulp from this boil in the freezer to add to the fresh cactus I boil next time, just in case there’s any goods left due to insufficient boiling time.

I noticed yesterday the “v”s in between the areoles on my other cuttings. Is this a sign of PC or non PC? I just read the other day what that even means, so now I’m curious what I have.

Posting a pic is the best way to ID-- but here's a guy writing a little about it-- may help you https://trichocereus.net...ne-predominant-cultivar/