Does anyone have a clue as to what 'form' this extract is? It came as 10 grams of a reddish brown powder but has turned into a solid lump.

I decided to dissolve it in hot water thinking it was a salt, and eventually it dissolved, turning dark brown and smelling strong. I added like 5 grams lye but noted no colour change, is this because it is actually in freebase form?... or because its a salt but needs more lye?

Anyone??

This is why we extract our own harmalas & don't buy that red crap from the internet. I have had some of this red powder "10x rue" I see all over the place before via a friend & even up to 1g it did nothing.

Worst case what you have is not harmalas at all, best case, you were gypped for a very crude rue extract.

Thanks. So you once tried it up to 1 gram and it did nothing, really?

I bought it several years ago out of curiosity, but i would expect to see something. I will make some more experiments...

Avoid any red, red-brown or brick colored extracts. See also this thread for another story of disappointment.

Good quality harmala HCl extract looks bright yellow to golden yellow. Good quality harmala freebase extract looks off-white to slightly tan.

Thanks pitubo.

Yes i was aware of that and confused why the extract was the red colour. I've since reading concluded that it might even be this 'harmala red', and the extract may be an Alcohol one?

Whatever, the based liquid did settle some solids this morning, although before i added base i noticed some settling anyhow although not as light!?

Well, i'm not expecting miracles. OK I'll add more base and see if i can end up filtering out some goodies.

It might as well be ground brick. If you did not get any precipitate even after adding as much lye as you said you did, I highly doubt that there were any harmalas in the extract.

Did you try looking at a dilute solution of the extract under a blacklight?

No, i dont have a backlight.

OK, added NaoH, will see if get more precip...

Well i added more NaOH, but didn't get extra precipitation. I ended up chucking it all down the sink because the results were too crappy to bother about. No, the NaOH wasn't wasted, it's at least cleaned the drains!