At Step 5, in the end one should decant as much of the lye water as possible and then one should add hot fresh water with vinegar.

I have a few questions about this:

1. Can boil the basified harmala in hot water and add vinegar + some water to it. Or should I just boil hot water with vinegar and add to the harmala?

2. How much vinegar is needed for this?

3. How much citric acid powder equals to white vinegar?

The last question was the most important for me and I found this:

"1 teaspoon powdered Citric Acid is equivalent to ¼ cup lemon juice (4 Tablespoons)."

And also alkan0id and soul-explorer ensured me in the chat that its not dangerous too have too much acid in the extraction.^

Just posted this if someone wonders the same.

pz

It only takes a dash of vinegar and a cup of water to dilute grams of harmaline. This may not be correct but I think you just want to get it hot, not boil it. The hottest time would be before the manske and I get it just shy of boiling. I figure they were boiled out of the seed but maybe because there’s less water and the alks are hightly concentrated you could accidentally burn it.

just make sure the pH is around 4 or so, it should all dissolve in that, acctually i think anything below 5 should do too.

but tbh, the tao of rue extraction helped me loose 300grams of rue seeds.

my recommendation would be to use food safe ingredients, calcium carbonate and citric acid/vinigar, I used lye and added too much, because it was such a strong base when i needed to acidify it it struggled a lot.

I would recommend using pH strips and just making sure it is well acidified and nicely basic when it needs to be, best way to figure it out, then you will figure out quanitity after that

No need to boil the basic soup and for safety it's better not to. Also, lye may damage stainless steel at higher temperatures:



Hot water with vinegar will make it warm enough. Actually heating is not necessary for the purpose of dissolving the freebase, but it speeds it up.

I've read on here that 10 ml 5% vinegar will dissolve a gram of freebase harmalas.
Your basic soup should have ~ 7% harmala content.


I think if you add the absolutely minimum amount of acid needed to dissolve the harmalas and dissolve them, your pH will be 7. But that's theoretical, and for practical purposes it's better to add more acid than the absolute minimum required, because the molecules need to find their 'partner' ions for the reaction to take place and the more ions from the acid floating about, the quicker the dissolution will be. (In that theoretical example of using the minimum amount of acid, it would take infinitely long, because the last molecule of freebase harmala would have to be very lucky to bump onto the last free acetate ion).


As long as you take safety precautions, lye works well, better than any carbonate as you need so much less. This allows you to go from boiling to basing without the need to boil it down to a smaller volume, which saves energy.

You only need a tiny bit. For my 10 liter pot I only need like a teaspoon or less. A pH pen can come in handy.

If you accidentally add too much lye, you can remove the excess by washing it with non-acidic water.

I followed it using only lye and only sodium carbonate and don’t have ph strips handy so like said if you make a strong solution and stir as you pour it in it is really easy to tell when you got it all to turn milky and just a splash of vinegar in warm watered swirled in the pan will dissolve fb. So it’s easy to get around needing ph reading materials. Lye changes it much faster, but I’m using sodium carbonate from here on out.

Sodium carbonate is okay. I make 20% solution first and then pouring that in while mixing.

I use 5% sodium hydroxide (lye) in the first stage since you need less of it.