Now the bad news – I weighed the powder: 68mg.

If this batch of salvia is about as potent as last years (about 2.7mg/g), I should have gotten a yield of over 81mg of pure salvinorin A. The quantity of powder I have is too small to further refine, but my guess is that I got about 40mg salvinorin A. So the bad news is that the yield isn’t nearly as high as it would be when using acetone as the initial solvent.

Over the past year, I harvested about 475g of salvia. I took 366g for extraction, and got 1.149g of salvinorin A – a yield of 0.31%, which is very good.

OK – I did a test of this idea, and I have good news and bad news.

Good news
Making a tea of salvia leaves and collecting the sediment yields salvinorin A!

Bad news
The yield is about half of what I’d get if using acetone as the initial solvent.

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Details

I started with 30g of dried salvia leaf (very fresh – harvested just a few weeks ago). I made a tea using about 300ml of water. I brought the water to a boil with the leaves, then removed it from heat. I let the tea steep for about 10 minutes (same as I’d do with any tea).

I then stirred the mix to make sure the salvinorin (if any) was suspended, and poured the tea out through a sieve.

I did this two more times, ending up with about 1 liter of tea. I didn’t reduce it – I was concerned about what might happen to salvinorin A when heated in aqueous suspension (in crystal form, I think it’s very stable, but I didn’t want to risk destroying it).

I let the tea sit overnight, and noticed that sediment had collected: it was a mix of some leaf particles that passed through the sieve and a finer sediment. I decanted most of the water, then put the sediment plus the remaining water in a smaller container and let it settle again.

When it was settled, I decanted the remaining tea (as much as I could without disturbing the sediment) and then added 50ml acetone to the sediment. I stirred, then allowed it to settle.

After settling, I decanted the acetone and discarded the sediment, which was mostly leaf particles.

I put the acetone in a shallow pan and allowed it to evaporate and the residue to dry thoroughly. I scraped up the residue, and it yielded a light green, sparkly powder – looked just like crude salvinorin A. – That’s the good news.

Now the bad news – I weighed the powder: 68mg.

If this batch of salvia is about as potent as last years (about 2.7mg/g), I should have gotten a yield of over 81mg of pure salvinorin A. The quantity of powder I have is too small to further refine, but my guess is that I got about 40mg salvinorin A. So the bad news is that the yield isn’t nearly as high as it would be when using acetone as the initial solvent.