Hi everybody,

don´t throw away your caapi after you cooked your Ayahuasca, particularly if you use shredded caapi.
A couple of weeks ago I brewed some Ayahusaca (Caapi only) and kept the plant matter for an extraction, just to see how much alkaloids are still in there. I was baffled.

I brewed my Aya, following some recommendations here on the Nexus, 5 x 49 minutes. The recommendation was 45 minutes, but I love to play with numbers so I did 49 minutes (7x7).
The water had PH 4 using phosphoric acid.
I used a mix of Caapi strains: 150 gr white, 50 gr very young black (branches 3-8 mm), and 20 gr yellow leaves.
The resulting brew was/is very potent.

After the cooking I threw the plant matter in a plastic box into the freezer to keep it fresh.

Last week I started to extract the remainding Harmalas using Gibran2´s tek.
I boiled it for another 5 x 49 minutes in my glass ceramic pot and yielded 1.69 gr of very slightly coloured Harmalas.

In order to be sure that the plant matter is now exhausted, I freezed it again and boiled it another two times in my pressure cooker. The yield at this time was only 87mg.

So I finally yielded 1.777 gr of nice Caapi alkaloids.
This are 0.89% yield calculated on 200gr Caapi (I skiped the 20 gr leaves in this calculation, because they definitely have been exhausted into my AYA).

So specially when you or SWIY is brewing his/her Ayahuasca with shredded Caapi on a scale of 100gr and upwards, I strongly recommend to perform an extraction on the material afterwards.

It definitely pays off!

Thanks a lot, this is indeed very interesting information! My first thought is that you may have used too little water, so the solvent (water) couldn't hold anything more. If you didn't use too little water, then your data seems to suggest that 245 minutes of cooking time isn't enough to exhaust the plant matter.

Twice this time, however, is according to your data enough to exhaust it more or less completely. That's just above 8 hours of cooking. This correlates well with the knowledge that ayahuasqueros usually cook their Ayahuasca all day long. Perhaps the indigenous people got it right this time too?

How shredded was it, what size of the pieces? Do you have pictures?

I have noticed that if mimosa isnt powdered, doing multiple hour-long boils is still not enough, the water very difficulty passes to the inner layers of the pieces. I think powdering or breaking it up as finely as possible is recommended in either case, if its possible . Yeah maybe indigenous people got it right for their situation, they didnt (dont) have industrial blenders to powder plants for their whole village But for us that do, I guess its much more energetically efficient to powder plant matter instead of all the energy to boil for endless hours

Thanks for the tests and for sharing the results, Garfield!

5x49 minutes? thats not enough. I brew for like 72 hours lately..and do at least a kilo at a time so I dont have to waste extra energy just to brew again right away..then rebrew the sediment..I rebrewed the sediment from a kilo and there was a few strong doses in there still..so rebrew the sediment for an hour or 2 after you decant, then add that back into the rest of the brew, then reduce. That should give people a stronger brew.

I dunno who around here says 5x45 but dont believe it.

When I brewed my Aya I ended up with ~7 liters of brew. Initially it was even more water, because the last 15 minutes of every brew cycle i took of the lid.

I don´t think that´s only a matter of brewing time, but also how often someone´s changes the water. And/or a combination of both.

Next time I´ll brew my Aya with powdered Caapi, and perform the same test on the residue.
Perhaps there is somebody out there, using the traditional route (3x3 hours) who could perform the same test.

Here is a picture, as a reference I placed 1Euro, 1Pound and a quarter US$ into the Caapi.
The thickest particles have 2-3 mm.


72 hours?!?
Ok. That´s really a long time. I thought about doing something like that, when I´m living in a house with agarden again. Performing that over an open fire.
I tried to find ad hoc the posts were I found the info that 5x45 is better than 3x3 hours but didn´t found it right now. It was somewhere in this section, because I informed myself only here to have all info needed for my first own AYA brew.

Interesting results.

Just for fun, let’s assume that your caapi contains 2% alkaloids (not an atypical yield). The 200g would then contain 4g alkaloids. If your second round yielded 1.69g, and your third round yielded 0.087g, then we can guess that your first round of boiling yielded about 2.22g.

So your first round of boiling extracted 55.5% of the alkaloids.
Your second round extracted 42.3%,
and your third round extracted the remaining 2.3%.

I’ve done similar experiments and posted the results a while ago. I managed to get what I estimated to be over 80% of the total alkaloid content with four 30-minute boils. I used vinegar – I wonder if the acid used makes a difference?

Anyhow, in both cases there is a greatly diminished return with increasing boiling times. In the end, one must find a balance between time and energy vs. alkaloid yield.


As an example, let’s assume 1kg of caapi contains 20g of alkaloids. Let’s say 80% of the alkaloids are extracted after 10 hours of boiling – that’s 16g. Let’s say 80% of the remainder (4g) is extracted after another 10 hours – that’s 3.2g.

So in this hypothetical example, we’ve extracted 19.2g of alkaloids in 20 hours. So the question now is – is boiling for another 52 hours really worth 0.8g of alkaloids???

With a good acidic brewing, the alkaloids remaining in the bark should be negligible...if you don't use acid, then you may have considerable amounts of alkaloids left.

I did an acid/non-acid brew comparison over here; as you can see, there were very few impure alks left in the acidic-brewed bark

no gibran I doubt anyone needs to boil for 72 hours, but 3 days brewing is not uncommon amongst indigenous peoples and there are rumours of the strongest brews being brewed for days like that. Maybe its the admixtures maybe its the vine Im not sure. But I am sure that brewing less than 9 hours always seems less than ideal. This recent brew though has been brewing for 3 days, except at night..so its not really 72 hours.. Im on my 5th wash now and the 4th looks very clear, only slightly tinted brown so Im sure I have exhausted the vine by now. Il find out soon if 3 days really makes a difference.

I also did my last kilo with acidic water from a digital water purifier with ph settings, and compared it to a brew I had in the fridge brewed with straight wild spring water. There was no noticable difference. I dunno what the ph of the spring water is though. I always brew with this spring water except for that one time with the filtered water. I never use tap water which has all kinds of shit added to it so who knows how well just tap water extracts caapi.

When we are talking about boiling Caapi for extraction, it makes no sense at all to perform a 72 hour boil.
When it comes to Ayahuasca than it´s another story.

I just remembered that in on of the ceremonies I took part in spain I drank a Yage from Columbia which was boiled for 7 days!
It was incredible strong. It had the strongest presence of the AYA-Spirit i´ve ever experienced.

Well, the only difference I can see in longer boils is that maybe something – some active compound – doesn’t easily go into solution. In that case, longer boiling might get something out at active levels where shorter boiling might not get it out at all. But whatever that "something" might be, it sure isn't harmine, harmaline, or THH.

Another possibility is that the long boils cause chemical reactions of some sort to take place. Maybe some active compounds are being synthesized by long boiling?

Otherwise, what’s the sense in long boils, especially if you're in a jungle loaded with caapi vine?

I would never use tap water.
For my Aya and this test I used demineralized water.

Maybe.
I could perform a little test with a tiny amount of that 7 day brew. I still have some.
Doing an extaction and see how much is coming out. But I have no equipment to perform a GC.

Regarding the long boils, I´m certain that the attention and energy from the ayahuascero plays a big role here.

Yeah I hear lots of stories similar to that.

I find that acids make discusting brews. I use vinegar if I am extracting harmala xtals. But for actaul brews I used vinegar in the beginning. The brews with vinegar or lemon were terrible and made me sicker. Even with rue I find it too discusting to drink or even smell with acids, but a rue brew with only spring water is actaully ok.

have you tried a vitamin C tab?

We just assayed an extremely potent brew, brewed 3hrs x 5 with unacidified spring water. It was even stronger than the last brew, brewed with acid water at 3hrs x 3 washes, and definitely more bitter.

If it cuts the necessary dosage in half, or close to half, another extra wash or two only adds to the magic. Who knows what else is being pulled with a cook that long?

some of those boils were even more than 3 hours..it was 5 boils some of them more like 5 hours..no acids only spring water..then after a day in the fridge I filtered and decanted, collecting all the sediments and rebrewed them as well..and still there was ALOT that came out becasue I took a sip of this sediment brew and it was active..

Brewing like this is a long process but it is far superior to any other brewing method I have read about on here..including the use of acidic water.

The sediment brew was added to the other 5 washes and it was all reduced together. This resulted in a thick syrupy brew that was definailty not burned. I have to emphasize this..people here constantly say that thicker brews are due to burning..that is just not the case here. Maybe some burn the brew but this did not happen here. The brew we have here resembles much more what I hear people describing drinking in traditional amazonian ceremonies. It is dark dark brown, thick and extremely bitter. Even after 2 days in the fridge it hasnt cleared up to a ligher brown semi transparent color like a usualy 3x3 boil would do. The brew prior to this I did with acidified water, with a professional water filter with ph adjustor..and that brew was NOT as powerful as this one now. The brew looks like syrupy jungle mud and is extremely powerful.

I simply could not drink more than 60g of this brew the other night..it was the most powerful caapi experience I have ever had..compared to other nights I have gotten down 100g..minxx who usually drinks 120g stopped with this brew at 75g..and it's not due to different batches of caapi becasue I had 2 kilos of this vine and this was the second kilo I used for this brew..

With only 1 gram of mimosa I had DMT flahes similar to smoking..more powerful than with other brews that are brewed for 3x3..

I am not sure if all the people that are extracting from caapi are decanting the brew first, then extracting..but I can guarantee if they are then there is more to extract still in there.

Id imagine properly powdering the material will help a huge amount. Im willing to bet pressure cookers and proper powdering could blast out the alkaloids pretty quickly without the need to use an acid. Perhaps a tiny drop to lean towards a lower PH, just a drop.
This needs testing MOAr. Girbans work was fantastic tho... 83% extraction with 4 30 minute boils... that's a whole bunch moar practical then 3x3.

Yeah I think we must keep researching on effective ways to get those alkaloids out, I always feel so energetically wasteful when boiling plant material for hours and hours on end. I think you might be onto the right track, Xt, about powdering and then using PC. I dont have a PC though but would be really interested in anybody who tested this!