I bought 50 grams of whole jurema root bark a couple of months ago. One of my goals with psychedelics, at least the kind that go into your body, is to treat them as genuine food as much as I can, so chemistry-based extraction techniques don't interest me. Instead I've been playing around with things like the eggstraction technique for soaking up the tannins, but haven't had much luck. Part of my problem is that I have a naturally high tolerance to most psychedelics I've tried, to the point where once a friend tried to keep up with me and went on a million year spirit journey while I just sat and pet my cat and watched over him. This makes it hard to tell if the issue might be lost potency or an undersized dose. I'm not keen on pissing off my jurema or burning through it too quickly, so I've been looking for ways to increase the potency, not the dose. In my introductory post I mentioned that I was interested in experimenting with fermentation-based extraction techniques, and that is what gave me my first success with jurema. Here's how I did it:

1. I ground 5 grams of the whole root bark in my mortar and pestle. Next time I'll go up to 7.

2. I put several cranks of freshly ground black pepper in the jurema powder. Black pepper is known for increasing the absorbtion of nutrients in a wide variety of foods, so this seemed like a no-brainer. Because I had them I also broke open some lion's mane/chaga/reishi/cordyceps/turkey tail/shiitake/maitake supplement pills I had and included them in the jurema mix.

3. I gently simmered the jurema mix in a stainless pot with a small amount of filtered water down to a thin sludge once. The point here isn't extraction, but sterilization to protect the cultures in the fermentation stage.

4. I took a bottle of GT's Island Bliss kombucha, which I chose because it has passionfruit in it, which my research has suggested may have mild MAOI activity, and I drank enough to make room. I let the bottle sit uncovered to let the CO2 escape to reduce the chance of a foam up, and then I put in the jurema sludge.

5. I also put in several drops of fulvic acid for the same reason I put in the black pepper, and then some sugar to kickstart the cultures since there wasn't a full scoby growing.

6. I put the kombucha into the fridge and let it ferment for several days. I regularly shook it around to disturb the sediment and make sure as much of the jurema was exposed as possible.

7. On the day I drank it I used a coarse wire mesh to filter out the gross particles and then used a spoon to smoosh as much out of them as I could.

When I drank the jurema I used a RIMA that might count as a research chem, so I won't name it. It's very old and well studied, but it's enough of a grey area that I'll just play it safe unless a mod is interested and talks to me about it. I'm only mentioning this in case it winds up being relevant because this RIMA is known for having anti-microbial properties, and cell apoptosis in the cultures might be part of my result.

The kombucha tasted nice, with only a slight taste of the purge.

I'm unsure how long it took to hit because I don't typically get strong visuals on psychedelics. Instead I turn into a poetry spitting machine, and most of my inner realizations get expressed that way. The best way I can describe the experience is that the drink itself was some amalgam of all the life that had gone into it, and that temporary spirit sat down and talked to me. It told me the story of how man first discovered True language, and how this was a story passed down for tens of thousands of years among the plants because we are some of the few animals in history that have learned the philosophy of speech as they have, though our methods are different. It makes us interesting to them in the same way that anything dangerous is interesting, but the focus is on the interest, not the alarm. An important thing to note is that because they can't move, plants like to think of us as their agents, or wish to make us their agents, and their intentions aren't always benevolent.

There's more I can talk about with the experience I had, but except to describe my results I'm getting off topic. I am unsure if just leaving the jurema in water in my fridge for several days would produce a similar result. I note that there was only a small suggestion of a purge, which I have seen other people report with cold alkaline extractions, but kombucha is an acidic extraction, which I believe is supposed to produce the largest purge? I'm uncertain. In the future I also want to experiment with using ultrasonic jewelry cleaners to speed up the extraction, both in cold water and in kombucha. I'm also interested in fermenting amanita muscaria sometime down the line.

As a side note I don't tend to take systematic approaches to this kind of thing. I wait until a recipe bubbles up inside of me, and I've learned that trusting that intuition leads to very good things in my life. I would be thrilled if someone with the time and resources for a systematic approach wanted to look at the idea, but as it is I'm happy following my meandering path.

Interesting report - I was getting a bit worried about your approach until you mentioned the RIMA. If it was moclobemide that's probably fine to mention since everyone else has - but thanks for being respectful of our attitude in that respect (whereas it would be better not to mention that anything was 'bought'...)

A certain proportion of people are indeed resistant to the visionary effects of entheogens and, while it seems you may be one of them, given your somewhat haphazard approach to brewing it's hard to tell. What if all the nootropic fungal supplements gave rise to your poetic inspiration, or if this was from the alcohol alone - this last a well-established phenomenon throughout literary history I think you'll agree? There are ways of changing more than one variable at a time but if anything one has to be even more systematic about it.


All that being said, I'm exceedingly poor at keeping notes and seem to be doing OK for it As long as you have a good enough memory it tends to work out - but always label your glassware!

Not my RIMA. I will be pleasantly surprised if I can introduce you guys to another RIMA that's easy to find. It's mentioned fairly often in scientific literature, but so are a lot of things that you're unlikely to find. A needle in a haystack.

I thought just not mentioning a source was all I needed to worry about? Eh. That "plants make you their agents" thing is something I've believed for a long time, so I don't think it's wise to become too dependent on plants you aren't growing yourself. You should at least be stuck in the same environment as the plant if it's going to be making demands of you, or else you'll constantly get confusing messages that cannot be interpreted correctly out of context. Right now I grow dandelions, tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers, and I'm looking to find new things I want to grow. Pumpkins, yarrow, catnip, St. John's Wort, and morning glories are at the top of my list right now.

I've experimented with using kombucha to ferment a lot of things this year, and you do get lots of unusual "more than the sum of their parts" effects. That's why I was so interested in this as an extraction technique for jurema. One of the intuition-based ideas that draws me to this is how if you see a poison in nature, but there is life, then the antidote is often not far behind. Sometimes it is even that the antidote itself is poisonous without the original poison, which creates a supply/demand situation in the environment that heavily incentivizes something to make more of the poison to keep the environment stable. Consider that iodine is most often found in the seas with heavy metals. Consider that oceans might already be making their own microplastics and feel a shudder of revulsion. What might happen, then, if you introduce a large amount of DMT to a culture? Also worth noting is that fermented foods tend to have tyramine in them. I'm drawing a lot of my inspiration, and guiding my research, based on reports of Kykeon from antiquity, Brian Shul's recovery after he was shot down, and amusingly this has lead me to wonder if Jamestown's white nights weren't about a Kykeon analog until the kool-aid was poisoned.

Ultimately the chemical contents of what I made are a mystery, especially any metabolites the kombucha might have made, but I do feel the jurema noticeably added to the experience compared to other times I've felt my way through a simple fermented recipe like this. I doubt alcohol was the "active ingredient" because enough alcohol to affect me just makes me inconsolably weepy, and magic mushrooms bring out my poetic side, too.

Ah! Something else worth noting is that the night afterwards I did get quite a lot of fractal patterns in my visual snow, and if I "looked at the light" I could resolve that into more detailed pictures that flew through each other. I've been practicing this sober for a couple weeks now, but it's not very strong on its own.

Don't get me wrong, I find your methods intriguing and they certainly have potential. While being far from a good example myself, I do think it would be advantageous to combine an intuitive approach with a systematic way of developing and interpreting one's experiments. [I should also point out that my initial reply was somewhat curtailed due to attempting to brew coffee while typing - there came a point where I simply had to press the 'post' button.]

One thing that should be asked is whether your bark is of proven potency. I would also suggest you try brewing with a bit of Syrian rue thrown in for good measure. We have at least a couple of threads covering similar things hiding somewhere in our archives.

There are quite a few further RIMAs to be found in the literature, but I'll refrain from engaging in a pointless guessing game. Suffice to say, without knowing which one it was it's hard to make any sensible inferences about the rest of your experiment.

I didn't think you were being impatient. I just wanted to provide more context for why I thought my read of the situation was reasonable, though inexact. Right compass direction, basically. That's the best I can say about anything like the potency of my jurema. I've shied away from syrian rue because I've been nervous about playing with strong non-RIMA MAOIs. I just need to do more research since psychedelics were a surprise tangent on one of my projects this past year.

I also have a message here that makes it look like I've broken a rule? I had done my research on the rules here and saw that talking about buying and selling legal plants was allowed, with the exception that you couldn't talk about how to source MHRB, that is, jurema. I didn't say where I got it. Have I misunderstood something?

It's all good; I felt my reply hadn't really done things justice - while struggling to type this with a glitchy screen on my device, I'm truly pleased that you've paid heed to the attitude rules; I tend to interpret the "no sourcing" rule very strictly. Thereby we can avoid even the first inkling of the possibility of a discussion in that direction. It's handy that the pixies can just unexpectedly leave plant material for us in our cupboards

Further good news is that harmalas are in fact RIMAs too. A lot of the cautions and warnings date back to the early '90s when this information was being pieced together in things like Jim deKorne's quarterly magazine, "The Entheogen Review". We have since found that a certain proportion of the warnings regarding harmalas were erring on the side of caution: dietary tyramine restrictions are not strictly necessary, for example, since, unlike in the case of the problematic, non-selective, irreversible MAOIs, harmalas are fairly highly selective for MAO A over MAO B, this latter subtype being the one responsible for metabolism of phenethylamines like tyramine.

Experience has also shown that the warning against combining with mescaline was equally unwarranted - but not everyone enjoys that combo - or mescaline alone, for that matter. "YMMV" applies as ever. However, caution still applies with certain serotonin releasing agents, which includes the 2C-T-x series as well as opioids including tramadol, and SSRI medication. In fact, instead of attempting to type this all out off the top of my head I'd advise searching the forum for some of the more up-to-date discussions of harmala safety here on the forum. And here's a link to our harmala interaction disclaimer for good measure. If you're mindful and well-informed, safe use of harmalas is not too difficult.

Syrian rue has its own character which is alone worth getting to know if you decide to include it in your wortcunning practice. Again, we have a wealth of information gathered here and a special bunch of people who will be happy to help guide you around it should you require the assistance

What you're describing is a common problem in programming, too: Obviously comments and documentation and word-of-mouth are essential for explaining what's going on, but it all gets out of date so quickly as a project evolves, so it'd be really lovely if knowledge could be timestamped so you could properly understand it within its own era. Evolving research is the same way.

Since fermentation is part of what I'm doing, awareness of tyramine and how it interacts with other things is important. This is actually what opened up psychedelics for me because in my research I kept coming across mentions of St. John's wort, favism, and ritualistic cannibalism, and I wanted to know why what I was doing suddenly felt so dangerous when I came to it with innocent intentions. I wanted to figure out how I could dodge what looked like a bullet heading my way without just giving up. What I figured out is that I was looking at poetic descriptions of what happens to people when they start fiending on herbs, and especially their extracts. Think about the difference between mate de coca and cocaine. The latter is an extract that robs the plant of all its virtue. I'm not trying to be judgmental about people who work with extracts, but rather pointing out there is a big difference between turmeric and curcumin, for example, and both should be given their own respect.

I've read reports of people enjoying syrian rue on its own, and I've experienced similar things with my own RIMA: Even if you're not introducing more DMT, you are slowing down the metabolism of your endogenous DMT.

Quick bit of recommended reading for you, given your angle on things: the late Dale Pendell's "Pharmako-" trilogy, "Pharmakopoeia", "Pharmakodynamis" and "Pharmakognosis". A great read that I feel you may well enjoy, his coverage of Peganum harmala (the poison of dreaming") is especially pertinent here. All three are currently available for perusal on OpenLib.

That's all for the moment, but I'll discuss more later. Enjoy!