6/4/21 Edit: This thread has matured to a simple TEK that will be supported here. Many thanks to all the great nexians that contributed to this work 💚

Getting some preliminary interesting results from ethyl acetate and want to get a work thread going here.

Ethyl acetate is cheaper than Limonene and increasingly available at hardware stores (it has substituted MEK as a commercial solvent). As discussed in this musing post, it can absorb some water which can make it compatible with over the counter aquarium 9.6% sulfuric acid for salting directly out of the solvent (sulfate mescaline salts are the prettiest 🤩.

Ethyl acetate has been tested before with some positive results by for example someblackguy.

A wet microwaved paste is used since water seems to help move mescaline into the solvent as was discussed in general in the microwave assisted thread. Completely dried paste may work too as someblackguy mentioned.

The process shares similarities with commercial ethyl acetate coffee decaffeination: steam is used and water is present to help diffuse the free base alkaloid into ethyl acetate.

Steps:

1) Make a Ca(OH)2 and NaCl microwaved cacti steam paste. Details in spoiler.
2) Pull with ethyl acetate (first picture). This is not dried over MgSO4 since it should only contain ~1.9% water, and be able to absorb up to 3.4% water during neutralization. Avoid whipping into a souffle, slow stirring and diffusion time works best (in the coffee process, diffusion/time is sufficient).
3) To help with the next step (neutralization), a few drops of ethyl acetate tumeric extract ate added. This changes the color from yellow to orange (second picture).
4) Neutralize with 10% sulfuric acid, one drop at a time and making mixing well (water should be absorbed into the ethyl acetate). When neautralized, the orange color from the tumeric curcuming extract dissapears and "glitter" starts to form. This glitter is a mescaline sulfate candidate (3rd picture).
5) Next (ongoing) will be to collect/clean precipitate and test it (bioassay, analysis, etc).

The process is straight forward and simple 🙂. As an alternative to the tumeric extract, pH strips or a different pH color agent could be used. I think we don't want to add excess sulfuric acid as a different bisulfate salt could form and/or a water layer could appear.

I'll update this ongoing work. Let me know if I'm missing something. Cheers.

Notes: A similar process was tested for acetone but it did not work well, but NaCl was not used. It could be that acetone or IPA works too if NaCl is used to have less water. Also, other things can be tried to neutralize the pulls, such as citric acid or fumaric right into the pull.

Updates:

- The sulfuric salted glitter was very easy to catch in a filter. As it dried, the off colors migrated up the filter paper leaving a white product. It flaked off easily (see image below). This product will be tested, I think it has a good chance of being mescaline/alkaloids (we will see).

-I added citric acid (soluble in ethyl acetate) straight into a pull sample. It became cloudy, so it seems that this could be another salting option. The result is not a beautiful glitter show though. We will see how well it is caught by the filter (in the past I've had issues with fumaric and limonene making too fine of a precipitate that sometimes gets trough filters).

- I did another test skipping the microwave and going straight from unsteamed paste to pulls. The paste was not as smooth/workable but the process seems to work fine. I reused salted ethyl acetate from a previous test for the pull, and the curcuming marker changed the ethyl acetate from yellow to orange. It was nice to see a real time visual indicator of the extraction (confirmed basic with pH paper).

Overall I'm really liking how ethyl acetate is working out in these preliminary tests so far. It's super simple (make paste, pull by mixing/decanting, direct salt to xtals, and collect white product candidate).

This seems really promising

If I understood it correctly, this is basically the same tek you described earlier and which use limonene, but here ethyl acetate is used instead of limo.

What about the smell?

With different acid, higher solubility in water could be an issue.

Yes, this is similar to the earlier process with Limonene (which itself is just really 69ron's TEK with minor changes). The nice thing about ethyl acetate is that the salting is more direct and less work (in my opinion). It is also impressive how it penetrates whole coffee beans with the help of water and removes 97% of caffeine in just 8 hours by diffusion. I'm hoping it also does a good job in the cacti paste.

Ethyl acetate smells nice, reminds me of an over ripened pear. It can get a little strong however, so working in a well be ventilated area is a good idea. As I understand it, ethyl acetate is present in foods and fermented drinks in small amounts and quickly breaks down into ethanol and acetic acid in the body. I believe the reason MEK was discontinued/replaced in hardware/paint stores is because ethyl acetate is less toxic (but not sure).

Yes, good point, water is a concern for other salts and may need to be managed. Organic acids (fumaric, malic, citric, etc) are soluble in ethyl acetate so they can be added directly to the pull (no need for drops from a separate solution containing the acid such as the Limonene/FASI method). If needed, it may be possible to dry the pull with MgSO4 (I haven't verified/tested this). By the way, over time nice xtals are forming in the simple citric acid test.

The sulfuric acid salting is beautiful. I catch myself staring at the glittering sparkling swirls with my jaw dropping, lol.

Very happy with this workup so far. Still don't know what is actually crashing, time will tell 🤞

Over 24 hours the cloudiness slowly turned into beautiful xtals. Whatever they are, they sure are pretty 🤩✨

This is very different than the product I get with limonene and FASI. That can be an unworkable chalky product that can't be decanted or caught by a filter by me (I probably don't have the best slow-drop technique).

If this is working it would be simpler than the sulfuric drops to recover xtalized product straight from the solvent. A little excess should not hurt either and would simply remain in solution. Just toss a pinch of citric acid straight from the pantry into the pulls. Need to check yields to make sure any unwanted water form the pulls (~1.9%) is holding on to any product.

I've been looking forward to each of your status reports, and I'm already shopping for food grade ethyl acetate.

To make the ethyl acetate turmeric extract, you mixed some turmeric powder into ethyl acetate?

According to the page you linked to, the turmeric is red above pH 8.6 and a "turmeric orange" color below pH 7.4. When added to the yellowish pull, is that why the resulting color is orange (yellow plus red = orange)?

And thus when the pH drops below 7.4, the color basically goes back to yellowish? Is it actually the same original yellow, or tinted slightly towards orange (which I'd assume because we have the original yellow plus a "turmeric orange" combination).

Since the turmeric changes color at pH 7.4, how do you know you're adding enough acid to get pH 6.5-7.0?

Thanks shroombee. We haven't tested the precipitate yet, so it may not be mescaline at all. Just FYI, we've tried many things before and usually the new stuff does not work. However, this is currently promising and sometimes we stumble into something new or relatively unknown/unused yet practical. If you do decide to get ethyl acetate for this, keep in mind it may never work since we don't have enough info yet. Even if it ends up not working, you would contribute to learning about this potential process though.

Yes, the tumeric powder extract was simply done with ethyl acetate and decanting/filtering (by the way, as extracted it is a beautiful orange color). The colors from the website are for clean water. Things looked different in ethyl acetate from a cactus extract, but there is a recognizable shift from orange to yellow when going from ~basic to acidic (verified with pH paper), and yes in acidic conditions the color looks similar to the color without tumeric (I tried to show this with the pictures). Also, the orange may become more red if more curcuming extract is added.

Getting to pH~7.4 should be enough since mescaline's pKa is 9.56 more than 99% of it will be in salt form (this assumes that curcuming and mescaline behave similarly in ethyl acetate and water, so that the meaning of pH~7.4 carries over to ethyl acetate).

As I work more with this I like to simply use pH paper, I'm starting to not bother with the tumeric or any other pH die. I'll take reference images of what the pH paper looks like.

A little extra acid doesn't seem to hurt either, especially for the case of citric acid. Some excess could change xtalization properties, but otherwise should innocently remain in solution and traces easily rinsed off. The exception would be a lot of sulfuric: it can break down ethyl acetate and the water it brings would eventually form layers resulting in the extra water salting work that could otherwise be avoided. Citric acid powder seems more robust (provided the 1.9% water doesn't hold on to it and decrease yields). Citric acid does not bring any water with it, and is gentle on the solvent. Both acids are pretty nice for different reasons and seem to roughly work. The result from sulfuric acid is beautiful too and the xtalization is much faster (30min instead of 24 hours). Note: professional chemist use sulfuric in alcohol to avoid adding water, but that is not OTC, that is why ethyl acetate's ability to absorb some water is nice when adding sulfuric acid sold for aquariums.

To estimate how much citric acid to use I assume that one molecule of citric acid neutralizes 3 molecules of mescaline. That means 100mg of citric acid powder will result in 430mg of mescaline citrate. So if I'm starting with 100g of dry cacti and expect 1g of mescaline citrate, I would add 232mg of citric acid powder to the combined pulls, let it dissolve/cloud, check pH and add more if not neutral or acidic. I imagine that with some practice we could end up simply eyeballing the amount of citric acid and not even weighting it or checking pH because we know there is some excess that does not hurt (we would need to make sure it does not affect xtalization significantly).

Thanks for all the info and experimentation Loveall. I'll be keeping my eye on this thread ; very interesting stuff .

Sounds awesome Loveall, great info and experimenting! Great idea to use ethyl acetate to extract cacti paste like an STB except not needing to separate any layers since it can absorb some water. Looks like mescaline to me.

I would be a little concerned about microwaves damaging some of the alks or some of the mesc sticking to the water in the ethyl acetate. Also no idea how readily soluble freebase mesc is in ethyl acetate, but seems like it would be. I tend to be paranoid about these things though.

This could be a pretty amazing Tek for cacti powder, please keep updating.

Thanks Kash, I really appreciate your feedback.

Updates:

- I'm no longer microwaving anymore after the feedback above. I don't find it necessary as the salty paste has a good consistency without it after stirring it well.

- It looks like pull progress can be tracked with pH paper (see first image below). The speculation would be that the alkaline free base alkaloids turn the pH paper green. If so, the process looks pretty efficient with ethyl acetate, with most alkaloids removed after 3 pulls. Vigorous shaking was done every once in a while, along with settling times of a few hours. There are no emulsions since water is bound to the paste. The pulls are clear and easily decanted as the paste sticks to itself like playdoh after it is allowed to settle.

- Starting with 100g cacti, 300g water, 25g of lime, and 120g of salt, about 125ml of ethyl acetate remains "bound" to the paste. Pulls were done with ~1x300ml, and then 3x200ml giving about 775ml of ethyl acetate extract.

- I salted the 100g cacti pulls with citric acid without any MgSO4 drying beforehand. It seems that salting can be monitored with pH strips too, when the green color dissapears salting is done. See second image with before (top) and after (bottom) salting pH strip results. See last image for what settled on the jars after salting (left jar contains first 3 pulls with a bunch of precipitation, right jar contains the 4th pull with barely any precipitation).

- Water content concerns have been brought up. I did a citric acid salting split with and without MgSO4 drying beforehand. About the same amount seems to crash (will measure and update), but the MgSO4 dried side of the split forms larger xtals and becomes clear a lot sooner (xtalization seems a lot better). When it comes to sulfuric acid salting, water does not seem to cause issues (as others have suggested). Sulfuric crashing is a lot faster and the solution becomes clear quickly without having to dry with MgSO4 beforehand. I currently prefer sulfuric because of this, plus the beautiful glitter is cool.

Work in progress. Cheers.

Well, looks like I'm learning that the microwave may be helpful in a different way: salting is much cleaner. Also, the extract is not as green/dark. I guess the microwave is destroying/modifying biological material and keeping it out of the solvent (?). Not sure about the mechanism, but the microwave tests were cleaner experimentally.

We would now need to be lucky enough to have the microwave not affect mescaline at the same time (if indeed mescaline is the product in this process).

I'm doing more tests, but switching back to the microwave process now.

Also, attaching a .gif animation of the sulfuric salting xtaline swirls just for fun.

Below is the filtered result from not-microwaving (from the swirling picture in the previous post). Similar in ammount to the microwave version to first order (post #1).

Differences with the microwaved paste:

1) When not microwaving, the solvent extract is a deep dark green in ethyl acetate. When the microwave is used, ethyl acetate picks up only a lighter yellow color.

2) Without the microwave step, a sticky precipitate formed in the jar walls during ethyl acetate salting. This was residue dried to a powder and picked up with a small amount of water. When acetone was added to this, a small ammount shiny xtals form (like in dg's dual solvent xtalization process). Presumably, this powder was is mostly other stuff that trapped some mescaline sulfate (wich otherwise is caught by the filter).

3) Without the microwave step, the filter paper has multiple rings in it (see image below). I think this is an indication of several different biological compounds in the ethyl acetate (including the deep green residue with Rf = 1 at the rim of the filter paper). This is a lot messier than the single ring seen on the microwaved process (the one seen in post #2 with Rf ~ 0.3). With the microwave step, the deep green in the extract is not present.

It seems the microwave breaks down complex plant parts into simpler ones making the ehyl acetate extract cleaner.

Same dark green color could be seen in alkaline alcohol extraction of cactus powder. Iniatially I thought that ethyl acetate would not extract it, which could be very convenient.

I would assume that it is some kind of chlorophyll.

Makes sense. The clear yellow color in the ethyl acetate pulls repeated again with a new wet microwave process before the pull (see image below). Experimentally, the green color/gunk can be reliably kept out of ethyl acetate this way (at least that is what I'm seeing).

Loveall, thanks for doing these experiments and keeping us up to date on your progress! How long do we have to wait until you report on whether you're getting mescaline?

Thanks. I think I'll get MS results in one or two weeks 🤞. Just need to land on a process that I like best and send that sample.

I'm really liking the citric acid salting now with:

- Microwave alkaline paste treatment (cleaner pulls). I can report no loss of yield compared to not microwaving (yield was actually higher)
- Drying pulled ethyl acetate over anhydrous MgSO4

Both of these together make a big difference with citric acid. If either is missing, citrate salts don't seem to precipitate that well, but with both in place pretty xtals form. I think we are simply seeing that we need to minimize plant and water content in the solvent (as others have pointed out, thank you).

Sulfuric gives beautiful glitter, but with larger extractions a brown residue forms that has low pH. Because of this, I'm currently focusing on citric acid salting. That's a good way forward I think.

Check out the latest citric acid result below (from a second pull, started with 100g of cacti powder). First pull have 320mg, but that salting was done with sulfuric acid - not sure how optimal that is.

For the record this is where the xtals from the image below come from:

- Alkaline cacti salty paste microwaved treated as described in the spoiler of post #1.
- Pull with ethyl acetate (the second pull was used in next steps, see first image below)
- Dry over MgSO4 and decant/filter
- Dissolve 1/8 tsp of citric acid (ethyl acetate becomes cloudy)
- Transfer to shallow pyrex dish and cover (second picture)
- Pour off solvent when clear again (~9h) and rinse with fresh ethyl acetate (this means I did not rinse under the xtals since they stuck to the glass - third picture).
- Allow to dry (second picture)
- Scrape up (4th picture)

It is really fascinating how strongly microwaving change it.
Would be great to know whether this applies also to other solvents, I would try it, but do not have microwave.

Sulphuric acid seems to be too harsh to ethyl acetate.

Perfect research, Loveall.

Did you taste the product? Just to confirm it's not just citric acid (although does not seem to be the case)

Fantastic work, Loveall! This really brings cactus extraction a gigantic step forward.
Best of all, we get some lovely, sparkly xtal pr0n

One further question to answer might be: would it be possible to mix mashed cactus with lime and salt, then simply run that through the rest of the process? This is something I would examine should the opportunity arise, although it's easy to imagine that mashing fresh cactus could be very messy.

Loveall wrote:

Also, attaching a .gif animation of the sulfuric salting xtaline swirls just for fun.

This appears not to have happened yet - did the upload not work?
Edit: It's ok, I'm just a numb-nut

It's great to read and see these updates, Loveall! Can't wait for the final results/conclusion on purity. I hope to follow this tek one day myself

downwardsfromzero: It worked for me when I downloaded the .gif!

Thanks guys.

Doubledog, I tasted the product and can say it is not citric acid (wasn't acidic at all). Not salty but only mildly bitter. I'm a little worried it was not bitter enough to be mescaline, will just have to wait for the test results.

DWF, that approach with fresh cacti would be interesting to try, I wonder what would happen. If outside testing does show mescaline with the powdered cacti process, I would want to try your idea. I have cuttings aging in my garage I could use.

Cheers