Cant get ph above 11.5 ??

[Friscoirish]

Can anyone help me? I can’t get my pH up to 1314 as high as I can get as about 11 it does turn dark, but I don’t feel it’s as strong as it should be. How can I get the pH to raise without adding any other chemicals?

 

[Sakkadelic]

What are you doing and what base are you using?

 

[Bas Sarkin]

And also: what pH measurement do you use? The most steady are the paper-indicators.



Electronic-indicators need to be calibrated, which is a lot of extra trouble before you can get precise measurements.

 

[subterraneanhigh]

Are you measuring the Base-Water or the soup? Litmus paper isn't very useful in the soup.
I read that one only needs to be higher than 10.5 for an STB extraction but my knee jerk reaction says that's still too low. I have a gallon of 12.5 Base-Water(Sodium Hydroxide) on hand pretty much all the time. The mhrb powder instantly turns black.

 

[2^DqoeHy*97u]

My properly calibrated pen craps out at 11.99. I'm not far into this but getting it up to that then dumping another teaspoon of lye seems to do the trick.

 

[Icon]

99% of the DMT will be freebased at 10.68 pH. Any higher doesn't make any sense to me. Maybe if you're relying on lysing the bark cells with high pH.

Makes more sense to break down the bark mechanically as much as possible, then lyse cells with a strong acid, so the DMT molecule can dissolve into the water and get out of the bark cells. Lysing the bark in alkaline conditions doesn't sound like it would be as effective if the DMT trapped between cells doesn't want to go into alkaline water.