acetone bombing vs fermenting

[mew]

i filtered and reduced a tea from several feet, finally deciding to extract it because it seems to have fermented ( i used a bit of lemon to make the tea with) i didnt want to use it because of potential bacterial growth and it was an opportunity to try acetone bombing.

i let this tea sit for a few weeks, white hunks formed and i separated them out. when i acetone bombed NOTHING precipitated, i added more, nothing. i stirred, nothing. absolutely nothing happened other than my tea became partially acetone. i decided to boil the acetone off before moving to extraction. seemed to work well enough

my conclusion is that if the tea sits long enough all the crap acetone bombing would precipitate is already insoluble in the solution. perhaps if one was in a hurry they might employ acetone, if not, just let it sit, itll precipitate a bunch of worthless stuff anyway

 

[The Day Tripper]

That makes sense, when you boil it the gunk becomes soluble, and caught up in the slime. Then if you stick it in the fridge for a few days, crap falls out and you get golden nectar. I had some bridgesii tea that i let sit for a long time, it molded as well, but after letting it sit for ~1 1/2 weeks at room temp it had decanted out a significant amount of sludge/crap.

Basically its like putting it in the fridge to decant, except it takes longer and theres a good chance it will start to mold/have bacterial growth.

I personally don't like tone bombing since i think you can lose some actives (i remember a nexian saying the precipitated crap from tone bombing was bitter), acetone is hard to come by where i live, it seems like a waste of good tone, and if you plan on doing a liquid a/b on the bombed tea i don't think all the tone evaps, even if you get it to syrup consistency. Then when you mix in your solvent it helps some of the gunk move over since acetone is miscible with NP's and Polar solvents. Leading to a dirtier product when you salt your limo/xylene/tolulene/etc. IE the tone pulls some of the moderately polar impurites into the slightly polar NP (since it has a bit of acetone in it), then when you salt it moves into the very polar water layer.

I think it would be interesting to try sterilizing a tea in a PC, adding pectinase, and letting the enzymes eat at the sludge for a week or so at room temp, since they work best at moderately warm temps. If its properly sterilized, you could get a nice not at all gooey or syrupy concentrated thats easy to filter w/o bacterial/mold growth. When i pectinased a tea that molded during the process it went from slimy gooey syrup into almost watery consistency and super easy to filter and get a clarified concentrated tea.