Some time ago I made my first steps with bufotenine extraction. It's been a bumpy road, so I decided to do a write-up on what I've learned. I'm going to try to write it as an extraction tek, although I'm not experienced in writing teks.
This tek is largely inspired by
Jorkest's and
OriginalFace's. Really, all credit should go to these teks, I can merely add some notes and details.
Materials:50g Cebil seeds (less works, more has not been tried at once)
OR
50g Powdered cebil seeds (if you happen to have some pre-grinded)
52g Sodium carbonate (washing soda, NOT baking soda)
1.3l Dry acetone (dry acetone has to be used, otherwise you will lose salts to the water)
5g Citric acid (Fumaric acid can be used, but I had trouble with the product from fumarates - mainly head-ache)
Some tap water
1 x Glass mixing bowl or jar
The Herbal Percolator (THP) - best to use glass here, since acetone will be used in it and might pull some plastic-nasties
2 x Glass jars (1 liter, or at least >300ml) - these are used with THP
1 x Evaporation dish (can be a small one, like a Petry dish)
Process:0. If you have whole seeds, grind them to a powder.
1. Mix the powder with an equal amount of sodium carbonate. Add water VERY slowly and mix, until the consistency is that of a quite dry dough. If you add too much water, add more sodium carbonate, until the consistency is good again. Mix thoroughly, until it has a homogeneous brown color. Let it sit for 1 hour. It should dry on its own by this time. Grind it to a dry powder using a mortar or whatever you like.
NOTE: If the mix is not dry (e.g. if it's not hard as stone and/or sticks to the sides of the container), put it in the oven at 50-100°C, until it's REALLY dry. If water is left in the mix, it will leak into acetone in the next step and absorb some of the product salts in a later step.
2. Add the powdered mix of freebase seeds and sodium carbonate to THP. Put ~300ml through THP and repeat this 5 or more times with the same acetone. The acetone should come out yellow-orange (very urine-like). Do this 2 more times with fresh acetone. You should combine the 3 batches of acetone into one. You should end up with almost 1l of dark yellow acetone.
NOTE 1: Make sure you wet the cotton filter with acetone before adding the powder on top of it. Stuff the cotton filter into the bottom of the bottle, otherwise some of the powder might leak at the sides.
NOTE 2: If the powder is dry enough and finely ground, the acetone will move slowly through THP (~5 mins per cycle). If it moves considerably faster, you can do more cycles with the same acetone and hope that there is not too much water contamination.
NOTE 3: More acetone batches can be used, but I've found 3 to be enough. Later batches yielded less <15mg product for me.
3. Dissolve 5mg citric acid in 50ml of fresh dry acetone. It should dissolve easily with a bit of swirling. Add the dissolved citric acid drop-wise to the yellow acetone from step 2. Clouds should form instantly, which is bufotenine and other substances forming citrate salts and crashing out. After some time the whole surface will be cloudy and make it hard to see new clouds forming. Swirl the acetone in the jar gently. When it rotates, the salts should clump together and settle to the bottom. Continue this process, until no new clouds can be observed. Swirl the acetone a couple more times to gather most of the precipitates at the bottom. They should have a light tan color. When most of the salt has settled, discard the acetone. You can pour it off carefully. Dry the salts (on a hot plate, if you are in a hurry). The salts will pull water from the air and get oily and dark brown-orange.
4. Add enough water to dissolve the salts. Then add around 2g sodium carbonate to it. Swirl it in the jar. The freebased bufotenine (and other substances) should crash out as dark brown lumps. Swirl them around and try to get them to stick to the bottom and the walls of the jar. The water should get couldy, because it can's hold all the sodium carbonate (I assume). When most of the brown resin has stuck to the bottom, add more water, until it gets clear again. Swirl it around to redissolve all of the sodium carbonate. Then discard the water and dry the brown goo on a hot plate.
5. Redissolve the goo in a small amount of acetone. Most of it should dissolve, just some clear sodium carbonate crystals should remain. Then filter the acetone through a cotton ball in a funnel.
6. Evaporate the acetone in a Petri dish to receive yellow-brown crystals. If you get a goo, try spreading it out in the dish until it dries.
The product is NOT clean bufotenine. It can be cleaned up e.g. by dissolving it in boiling limonene (which I didn't have). I can smoke it without any problems, though. Both, evaporating it on some mint leaf or smoking it pure in a glass pipe worked fine.
The whole process takes 6-8 hours for me, if performed in one go. Though, single pulls can be done independently. Basically, single batches from step 2 can be taken all the way to the final product.
I'm sure this is not perfect and can be improved. But I hope I could add some helpful details.