I've got some herbs on order and I'm going to make my first attempt at making changa next week. I plan on using 250mg of Caapi and 250mg of Calea Z. But a couple of questions.

1 - what would be better to use, 99% IPA or 95% grain alcohol (everclear)?

2 - should there always be a 1:1 herbmt ratio, or if I'm using caapi can I reduce the amount of DMT at all?

3 - anyone see a potential problem with that mix of herbs? I'm going for something deep and dreamy.

Thanks all!

ps

1- both will work fine, the IPA should evap faster.

2- reduce as much as you like, you might need to smoke more to get the desired effect though. but 30-40%dmt will be a nice smoke

3- nope

thanks gammagore!

one other question - how should I gauge how much IPA to use? just enough to cover the plant matter, a little less?

i use about 30ml/gram dmt, and a small sauce bowl kinda thing so the ipa just covers the leaf.

1 - Everclear
2 - Not always; you could do a 2:1 or whathaveyou, but it'll just be a weaker blend and you'd need to smoke more to get the desired experience. Personally I'd do a 1:1 ratio..that certainly wont disappoint.
3 - No; that'll work great!

i was actually going to use a shotglass until the IPA was absorbed / evaporated, and then spread it out on a glass dish to finish evaporating / drying...

thatl work fine, might take longer to evap since there is a smaller surface area,.

is your caapi leaf potentiated (10x, etc)?

I wish we had Everclear in my country. you cannot buy pure or high proof ethanol
here without it being deliberately poisoned/methylated to make it unfit for human consumption.

Nope, just straight caapi leaf from the vendor. I'm still not quite sure what potentiation (is that even a word? lol) is or how to achieve it. I assume it's caapi leaf that's been enhanced somehow.

ps

You assumed it right It is enhanced by extracting harmalas and then evaporating the whole lot on dried leafs. There are threads about how to do this on the forum. You can use one day or 30 days tek. I did the 30 days one cos I did not know about the one day one

[/quote]You assumed it right It is enhanced by extracting harmalas and then evaporating the whole lot on dried leafs. There are threads about how to do this on the forum. You can use one day or 30 days tek. I did the 30 days one cos I did not know about the one day one [/quote]

so how do you test to see if it's 10x, 20x, 500x?

I'll look for the TEKs on how to do it, I'm rather intrigued now...

There's no way to accurately measure the potency of a pre-made extract, other than extracting the compounds from it and weighing them, then dividing the result by the normal amount of compounds in the same amount of plain leaf. That's why the recommended way to go is extracting the harmalas yourself and deciding how much you are adding to the blend. That would be for instance 1:1:1 harmalas:herbs:spice.

If you have purchased herb extracts, the potency should appear somewhere in the package, or in your order. Unless what you have is plain Calea and Caapi leaf.

Easy if you do it your self , difficult if bought and almost never the potency as stated on the tin

so here is how to calculate it if you do it your self.

Example: you have 20g of leafs. You put one gram on site and use 19g for extraction. Once done you can infuse your one gram with extract. Then after its dry you weight it. Lets say you end up with 2g of final product. Now you count 19g + 2g = 21g / 2g = 10.5x

So at the end you have 10.5x in 2g

Unless I got it all wrong, I think your example would actually go like this:

- 20 g of leaves, 1 g set aside for infusing, 19 g for extraction
- Extraction of 19 g yields (following your example) 1 g of alkaloids. These are the actives present in 19 g.
- You dissolve the gram of product and infuse the gram of non-extracted leaves with it.

Now you'd have 2 g after evaporation, which contain the actives of the 19 g extracted plus the leaf and actives in the single gram set aside. That means you have the alkaloids of 20 grams in 2 g, hence the alkaloids of 10 g in 1 g, making that extract 10x.

True ,thanks for correcting me (I started my example using one gram taken out of 20g and then I counted it as if I used 20g for extraction plus one gram put on site )

so as you said its 20g in 2g and thats 10x.

The formula is always how much grams was used for extraction divided by weight of final product.

Thanks for the responses and suggestions and advice everyone.

The changa finished on friday, and I tried it out saturday night. You can read about the experience here:
https://www.dmt-nexus.me...aspx?g=posts&t=36397

it was so beautiful, can't wait to get back...