Greetings all,

I believe I may just have stumbled across a revolutionary advancement in harmala extraction technology! I haven't actually finished this extraction yet, but preliminary indications are that I have extracted 99.9%+ of the alks from 60g of rue in a THP using only 1 litre of water.

I got the idea for this tek by accident during my last extraction several months ago, when I tried pouring additional boiling fumaric acid saturated water onto the wet rue seeds sitting in the filter to see if I could get more alks to come out. The water took a very long time to soak through the rue and filter, much like how a THP works. What I have tried this time around is a more refined focus on this approach, and I'm amazed by the initial results, in that the acidified water now dripping out of the bottom of this THP is TOTALLY clear. It seems that everything has been pulled out. The basic premise of this tek is that a THP can be made much more efficient by instead of using lots and lots of slightly acidified water and taking hours to reduce it all, using a very small amount of VERY hot, VERY acidic water. It appears to work marvelously.

Here is a basic outline of the tek, which is very much in its infancy. No doubt refinements and adjustments could be made to improve it (Sorry I don't have any photos, my camera is useless at close-ups):

1) Get a wide-necked HDPE or polypropylene bottle (PTFE would probably be a bad idea) and cut the bottom off. I used a 500ml bottle, which was good for 60g of rue, but larger amounts would need a bigger bottle. Turn the bottle upside down. Get some small cotton pads (or cotton wool if you can't find pads - the pads were ideal for the bottle i used) and stuff 3 into the neck end of the bottle. Drizzle some water around the inside edge of the bottle and use a rubber-tipped pencil or other pokey device to ensure the edges of the cotton pads make reasonably decent contact with the edge of the bottle all the way round.

2) Pour your powedered rue into the bottle to rest on top of the cotton pads. Place another cotton pad on top of the rue and again use a drizzle of water and pencil to secure it nicely on top of the rue. Get your large collection jar and place your funnel with coffee filter paper in it. You will need some kind of spacer - I made one out of old bits of K'Nex - to hold your upside down bottle above the filter paper. With this setup you have two filtration stages in one, which should vastly reduce the amount of effort, time and hassle consumed trying to filter boiled seeds.

3) This setup is now ready for the boiling FASW. Boil roughly 250ml of water (preferably filtered water, especially if you live in a hard water area) and add 4g of fumaric acid, stirring/shaking until the acid is fully dissolved. Then pour into your THP. How quickly the water comes through will of course depend on many factors: the amount of cotton wool used, how finely powered your rue is, the width of your bottle, etc. For me it took half an hour to a hour before the first drips came out of the THP and onto the filter paper.

4) Repeat step 3 another 3 times. I "only" used 3g of fumaric acid for the final pull, to make it a nice round total of 15g for 60g of seeds.

5) After this, I poured through a final 250ml of near-boiling water with no acid added, to redissolve any acid crystals and flush out the last of the alks. Once most of this water had gone through, what dripped out of the bottom was totally clear and still rather acidic (~pH 2.8ish), indicating that damn near all of the alks had been pulled out of the rue.

6) Base out the freebase alks and finish your extraction as you would usually. I've not done this yet for this tek, but the yield should be HIGH.

Notes: This tek uses a ridiculous amount of fumaric acid, mainly because the focus here was to use the smallest possible amount of water to extract the highest amount of alkaloids. In this regard I believe this tek to have been a success. It may be possible to still achieve similar efficiency using a lower acid/rue ratio than 0.25. Using 4g of fumaric acid for the first pull yielded the most ridiculously concentrated liquid I've ever seen. A very deep red solution of harmala salts.

Clogging of the coffee filter paper is still an issue, although not nearly as bad as boiling up the seeds in a pan and trying to filter that. This method is also much more efficient. Boiling the seeds, even for hours, in acidified water, still leaves a lot of alks in the seeds, in my experience. Since each dose of 250ml FASW takes a few hours to seep through the THP, one needs to be industrious so as to finish all the pulls in 2 days or less. I'm now on day 3 and mould is growing in the cotton pads on the bottom. This tek isn't quick (what rue extraction is?), but it is easy. Has anyone already come up with a tek that extracts alks this efficiently using this little water?

This tek hasn't been tested on caapi. I've got some very potent powdered caapi that I have never been able to extract well using any tek, so this would be interesting to try.

Is this a breakthrough in harmala extraction? Comments/feedback/suggestions welcome.

alk

Thanks for reporting! please follow it up to the end with yields so you get a solid yield numbers.


1. As said above, it is nice to see final yield numbers before judging.

2. You also based the success of the approach (and also quoted that you retrieve 99.9%+ of the alkaloids) on colour alone. Colour can be awfully deceiving.

3. You could have used a blacklight to see if it the clear final liquid has any harmalas or not.

4. You need a "control" experiment to give you an understanding of how many alkaloids you have in the seeds in the first place. This could be something like boil 60g of seeds from teh same batch 1h x 10-20 times (to completely exhaust them), retrieve alkaloids and then compare how your modified THP approach compares to the painstacking boiling exhaustion of the seeds. Better? worse? Right now from your report thus far I feel it could swing either way.

Yeah, fair enough. What I've provided is far from scientific or complete. I'll be doing the A/B over the next couple of days so should be able to report a yield later this week. The last extraction I did on this batch of (aging) seeds using a combo of boiling and this THP method produced something like a 7% TPA yield, and 5% after Manske. I don't have a blacklight, but another reason I was confident that almost all of the alks had been pulled was that the pH of the clear water was very low, unlike the earlier pulls which came out at pH 5 and then pH 4, indicating that less and less of the acid molecules were finding something to bond to.

You're right about needing a control for it to be scientific. I don't really have the time or resources to do this myself. At any rate it does look like a promising alternative to the nightmare of filtering boiled seeds. As said before though, the filter still clogs. Replacing it with a fresh coffee filter at least once would probably be a good idea.