So SWIM had 100g of dry T. Peruvian and wanted to do a simple extraction on it assuming a yield anywhere between 3 common doses and 3 heavy doses. He decided upon using ethanol in an herbal percolator for the sake of expedience, reliability, and in order to gauge the potency of the source material. SWIM plans on simply evaping and oven-drying the extract, scraping it up, and loading it into capsules.

Anyway, the extract seems to be yielding crystal needles alongside the expected tarry extract, and SWIM was wondering whether this was normal for ethanol extracts, or whether this is something perhaps unique to the THP method.

SWIM was also wondering:
-whether it would be a good idea to clean this up with acetone after it dries completely?
-whether IPA could be used in place of ethanol (for the sake of cost) as long as the product is washed with acetone?

This is SWIM's first time extracting from trichocereus.

Methanol would probably work the best but IPA should work fine too carrying trace minerals as well, chlorophyll and the like. All is left to do is evaporate. report back w/ results!

Percolate on

btw, SWIMs mescaline almost always turns out as a dark tar ranging from orange(citric), yellow off-white(hcl/sulfate) w/ethanol.

That's the general colors of your straight ethanol extracts?

SWIM's was a dark green tar with orange/yellow/tan on the outside thin parts. He washed it with acetone to yield dark tan rocks or flakes, though upon oven drying notices more green tar.

amor_fati, SWIM has done this with ethanol, methanol, IPA, water, acetone, etc., etc., etc., but used a Soxhlet, which is a more sophisticated device similar to a THP in how it extracts.

With ethanol, methanol and IPA, the extract is dark green and quite watery. With water the extract is thick and not as dark green. NEVER USE WATER, it’s the worst solvent for extracting cactus.

SWIM never washed a straight extract with acetone. He has no idea what might happen. You might lose some of the mescaline. No one knows what salt form of mescaline is in the cactus. It could be slightly soluble in acetone. Mescaline acetate seems to be soluble in acetone as well as mescaline fumarate.

A better far simpler way to extract is the d-limonene STB tech that uses calcium hydroxide, then a salting with HCl, and then a wash with acetone. I posted the tech on this forum in the mescaline extraction thread. With that method you get nearly pure almost white mescaline at the end. You also get better yields.

Whenever SWIM used heat to extract mescaline from the cactus he got pour yields. Many others have noticed that boiling the cactus reduces the potency. I think the salt form in the cactus is not very heat stable. I know that mescaline HCl is pretty heat stable. Without knowing the salt form in the cactus, you might not be able to form mescaline HCl by simple adding HCl to the cactus in the ethanol.

I wouldn’t use heat for the initial extraction. The d-limonene STB tech that uses calcium hydroxide extracts without any heat and SWIM got the best yields of his life using that tech. The only time heat is used is at the end to dry the heat stable mescaline HCl.

Well SWIM's just using what he's got on hand at the moment, but he would love to be using your tek and plans on using it as a starting point when he obtains all the materials required. SWIM even plans on cultivating cacti, starting this Spring.

All of the acetone used to defat the extract has been saved, and SWIM even tried to precipitate out of it using CASA, but nothing seemed to happen. SWIM will probably be able to guess at the acetone's potential mescaline content after bioassaying the extract. If the natural salt-form of mescaline is in fact insoluble in acetone, then defats could be performed prior to extraction, eh? Perhaps with TSP in an aluminum or HDPE bottle (SWIM really hates manual filtering)?

There is a good deal of leftover material alongside the product in his now quite sandy extract. The extract seems to be about a 10x extract, but SWIM has run out of ethanol and would like to attempt more extractions from the material in THP with IPA. The dose is already quite heavy at 3g per, so if the bioassay turns out bunk, he'll use whatever's leftover (including evap of the acetone defat and evaps of IPA) and attempt your tek.

I wish I knew what form of mescaline is in Trichocereus and if it's heat stable or not. Many on the net claim it's not very heat stable.

I've seen extraction techs that used boiling ethanol and a Soxhlet and they got fantastic results from San Pedro. When a Soxhlet is used, the solvent is usually boiled for 10 hours or more. That would indicate that the natural mescaline salt in the cactus is actually stable. Poisson in 1960 reported 2% mescaline yield from dried San Pedro Soxhlet extracted with ethanol, acidified with HCl, defatted with ether, freebased with ammonia, extracted with chloroform, and finally purified by distillation at 80 C at 0.01mm.

I'm a little skeptical with Poisson's figures. SWIM never had good results using a Soxhlet to extract mescaline. He tried methanol, a 50:50 mix of methanol:ethanol, and 99% IPA. None of them gave good results. The best results SWIM has had were from using no heat for the initial extraction. But maybe SWIM has been doing something wrong after the Soxhlet extraction, and he was just unaware of it, or perhaps his cactus was just bunk? Cactus varies a lot in potency.

SWIM's still sitting on this extract and he was wondering whether a decently pure yield of mescaline HCl could be obtained from it using lime or sodium carbonate, with acetone and without using limonene (as it's currently not available to SWIM). At this point it's about a 10x extract using ethanol after washing with acetone, so if anyone's done any sort of alcohol extraction, you probably have of good idea of what comprises it. Any thoughts?