Greetings Fellow Nexians!

As the title suggests, I am hoping that people may be able to offer any advice or suggestions - or even point out any 'rookie errors' - in my attempt at making a homebrew complete with admixture plants.

I have drunk Aya both in the UK and in Peru over the course of the last five years, but I have only recently decided to make the move towards homebrewing. I made this decision as I no longer find drinking in groups conducive to my own personal healing. I also feel that I need to drink often due to the nature of my difficulties. Cost and drinking on my own schedule are other important factors.

I started off by brewing up 500g of caapi to get to know the vine by herself. I smashed the vine with a hammer and left it to soak overnight in filtered tap water (I don't seem to be able to find access to distilled water). I then boiled the vine for approximately 9 hours without changing the wash, as I have heard this works equally as well? I topped up the pot periodically and added some apple cider vinegar to the mix. I boiled the brew down to 300ml, which I consumed on four seperate occassions. Each experience was deeply healing and left me with a positive afterglow.

I then decided that I was ready to introduce an admixture plant. I wanted to prepare a brew for a friend and I to drink so I smashed and shredded 250g caapi of the same batch, and again left it for approximately 12 hours to soak in filtered tap water. I then added approximately 7g of chaliponga and four tablespoons of white vinegar. We boiled it for slightly over nine hours, although no more vinegar was added - just a squeeze of some lemon about half way through. An hour or so towards the end of the brew we added about 100g of chacruna leaves.

The brew was then boiled down to 100ml for the two of us; we wanted to make the shot as small as possible, as we both struggle massively with the actual drinking process. As usual I held my nose when drinking, but this time I noticed a slight burning sensation in my throat, although I didn't think too much more of it at the time.

It turned out that both my friend and I experienced absolutely no change from baseline from the brew, which has left me wondering what it was that we had done wrong? Was it using white vinegar in too small a quantity, or perhaps we boiled it down too fast and burned the medicine? Maybe the chacruna should have been added at the beginning?

Any thoughts or suggestions would be very much welcome

- Emu

Don't sweat it man lots of us have failed brews before. I've tried four different times and each one failed (that contained an admixture) the caapi experiences on their own were fantastic and I really have come to love harmala alkaloids. That being said.... this is what I'll TRG next time and maybe you should too. I'm going to brew about 3g of Syrian rue and 8g of acacia confusa SEPARATELY and then drink them back to back. Obviously you can use caapi instead of rue but I feel like the small amount of place t matter will make for an easier job.

When you reduced it to 100ml the bottom of the pan was much hotter than the water could mediate the temperature and you achieved higher temps than 100C, effectively vaporizing or otherwise degrading your medicines. The bottom of the pan approaches the temperature of the heat source without water to mediate it.

Reduce at low, controllable temperatures. Ovens set at low with the door open, precise heat plates, those dealys.

It's a good question and knowing how to do it right will keep you from failing again.

In addition to the previous comments, it is important to also consider the period of time before and just after ingestion of the medicine. I went through ten brews, all of which didn't affect me but occasionally affected others. As it happened, because I was doing a complete fast for the night and morning prior to consumption my digestion was not prepared for the medicine and it would leave my body pretty much exactly as it had arrived. To remedy this, about fifteen minutes or so before drinking eat something like bread or rice.

It's worth saying that your plant material may have been dry degraded garbage, but hopefully that was not the confounding factor from the beginning.

Like when people work with inactive Acacias and ask "What went wrong? I did EVERYTHING right."

Can't squeeze water out of a rock.