Hi all i was planning on doing a crude 5X enhanced leaf extract and was wondering whether my rather basic method would work?

My plan is as follows, 6grams finely crushed salvia put into a bottle filled up just enough to cover all the leaf with 190proof alcohol and left for 24hours agitating every couple of hours. Then strain off the solids from the alcohol into another glass and place 1 gram of crushed salvia leaf in the resulting liquid and leave to evaporate.

The idea for using 6gs instead of 5gs for a 5X is to make up for any possible waste. Will this work? Any advice is greatly appreciated.

It would work but, as you say, crudely. Why not use acetone and soak for just a minute or two? That way you concentrate the terpenoids without concentrating the tannins.

I will have to look into buying some acetone, I will be doing this crude extract tonight but will be seriously looking at using acetone for my next extract. Thanks for the reply Entropymancer, at the moment im only really looking for a crude extract as where i live you can't buy it at your local tobacco shop. Hopefully this crude extract will be enough to get me to my first salvia breakthrough

It's really worth it to just buy some acetone and stick it in the freezer. You'll end up with nice, clean, sparkly extract that isn't full of gunk you don't want.

I'll second that. Are you really so eager to have your first breakthrough smoking a tar-like goopy mess? You say that you're planning on doing the extraction tonight... but since you're talking about a 24-hour deal, you'd actually still save time by grabbing some acetone from the hardware store in the morning and doing it then.

Note that acetone won't clean up a crude ethanol-derived extract. The whole idea is that, since the desired chemicals are sequestered on the leaf surface, you do a really quick soak to extract them without the solvent penetrating into the leaf itself and pulling gunky tannins and pigments and things.

Check out Daniel Siebert's 2004 paper "Localization of Salvinorin A and Related Compounds in Glandular Trichomes of the Psychoactive Sage, Salvia divinorum" [Annals of Botany 93(6): 763–771] (pdf link) for the theoretical details behind the process. Siebert used chloroform instead of acetone, but it's the same idea.

Not sure if anyone has refined the technique, but Sphere's Salvia Divinorum Extractions using Chilled Acetone (pdf link) gives some hands-on advice on how to go about it.

From what you've posted I think I will save the alcohol and go get some acetone to do the extract thanks again for the links. I was wondering whether or not it would be viable to use my 190 proof to make a tincture, if so what would be a useful way to do so if I only have a little under 50grams of leaf?

Thanks again everyone for your advice and links provided