Just how helpful would it be to know the solvent/water partition ratios of reasonably pure mescaline base using different solvents?
Is this a thing that would matter to anyone? I'm happy to just use xylene forever

After spending the first half of pandemic year just tripping my brains out I started to get actual lab work done. I was reviewing my long list of potential projects when partition ratios occurred to me. I recently pointed out to someone that the octanol/water partition ratios sometimes reported for compounds are not a directly practical value, just a guide to estimate guesses from, since no one actually extracts anything with octanol.
But every time I've made mescaline I was left wondering just how the mescaline partitions and how much variables like plant gunk effect it.
One could load refined mescaline base into a selected NP solvent, extract it with an equal volume of distilled water, then titrate both phases to see what the partition ratio is.
Perhaps determine ratios for xylene, heptane or isoöctane, and n-butanol. Or something. Then we would have practical data for specific solvents.
Granted, an extraction scenario would be different, with the lye and plant gunk in there, but we would have quantitative data on how well a few solvents pull mescaline out of water.
Should these data be added to our knowledge by spring?
Does anyone even extract from liquid phase anymore or am I the last one using my grandfathers techniques while everyone else does STB?

Missing would be the exact solubility of mescaline base in water, which could be determined separately.

I hope mescaline base is stable to oxygen and heat

I would definitely be interested in any such data as I still do not fully understand what is happening during extraction process.
Last time I extracted mescaline, I noticed that when water (without any acid) is mixed with xylene after pull from basic soup, water turned quite basic. Seems like freebase could be extracted into water directly.
I do not use STB with cactus, mostly use alcoholic extraction as an intermediate step.

Besides experiments, if anyone has access (or figures out how to get access) to a chemical simulation program like SPARC, they could predict predict partition coefficients for us, then we could go and experiment if any solvent that has not been tried yet pops up.

As for FB mescaline, I've tried to get it but never succeeded in getting anything that wasn't a nasty syrup. Good news is that in my case the material was reversible to a crystalline salt, even when heat/air where used.

I exploit this!
I both noticed this property, and I saw that the orange gunk that also gets pulled through acts as a weaker base than mescaline. When the pulling water is basic very little gunk dissolves, more dissolves at pH 7, and lots dissolves as pH turns acid.
What I do is combine my xylene pulls and let settle overnight in an old pharmaceutical graduate so the last haze of lye water settles out, then I start pulling into distilled water with a slow careful addition of HCl, tracking it by pH paper tests on microdrop samples pulled from the mix by a pasteur pipette. Initially the water is over pH 10 due to dissolved mescaline base. As more and more mescaline•HCl builds up and base gets removed, after mixing, the pH will gradually drop to 9. I then set this water fraction aside and put in fresh distilled water and try to add acid until I hit pH 7. If I overshoot a little bit it doesn't matter because I then combine the water fractions, bringing it back to basic, and titrate with my pH meter to 7,0
By titrating carefully the orange contamination is quite reduced, by not drying the aqueous solution when there is excess HCl the orange is not degraded to a gunk thats hard to remove from the product. An acetone wash of the powder will get it cream white and recrystallization easily gets it snow white.The literature usually lists it as a nasty syrup
I think to establish water solubility I would base refined mescaline, take up into xylene, combine xylene with distilled water, distill off the xylene-water azeotrope, and titrate the remaining water after removing it from the mescaline base syrup.

I think to derive partition coefficients for good mescaline solvents the best trick to avoid water saturation limitations would be to extract base from solvent using distilled water, then extract that water extract with an equal volume of fresh solvent and titrate both. That way the solubility of mescaline in water could not be a limiting factor in the partitioning.

Your method seems like very slow and carefull titration, with reduced risk for overshooting
good idea

Hi Elrik

I like your idea of reserving the first aqueous pull to adjust an overshoot. Ive been setting some solvent aside in case I overshoot but your method seems better.

I have a question. I can no longer use xylene where I am so have switched to limonene. I am finding that the mixing of solvent and salting layer needs to be incredibly vigorous, like over the top shaking the absolute SHIT out of the vessel. I will add water and see that the PH is high so add acid and it comes down, shake it a little and it doesn't rise much... Shake it REALLY hard out and it rockets back up. Does anyone else find this with Limonene? I don't remember the shaking/mixing needing to be so vigorous with Xylene. It does mean that the aqueous layer can remain acidic for some time and the orange colour comes over, Im definitely finding titration takes longer. Do you have any experience using limonene in place of xylene?

That being said its not a big deal as sulphate just recrystallises directly from water with the right solubility so it leaves a lot of crap behind. This is 7 grams coming to life in the dish

Your observation isn't surprising. Aromatics more readily 'slip' in and out of water. Even xylene has some solubility. Limonene is much closer to heptane in character and doesn't play well with the water, so it makes sense that equilibration would be slower. Especially without a mechanical stirrer.
If you're stuck not using aromatics then a co-solvent might help interface the two phases better. In cleaners they add butoxyethanol for that, you obviously couldn't do that because it would contaminate everything but a little butanol or amyl alcohol might do it fairly well. Or even a little ethyl or isopropyl alcohol, which would have the benefit of actually being obtainable.

So a shot of vodka might help swing things in the right direction.