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Cold Acetic Acid Extraction of Caapi

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Enoon

Enoon

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These are my preliminary results as it's not entirely done yet.

I preformed a cold acetic acid extraction of white Caapi from the MHUK vendor. A previous extraction via this method boiling 5x45min yielded ~ 1.2% alkaloids after several prufication steps. So I want to see if I can reach the same with a cold extraction.

I preformed the following steps:

1) took shredded vine and shredded it finer.
so it went from looking like this
10122010_001_new.jpg

to looking like this
10122010_new.jpg


2) I threw it into my favorite PP container
th_10122010_002_new.jpg
th_10122010_003_new.jpg

and measured out 300ml of 3% acetic acid and added that.

3) let soak for 3 days, i.e. 72 hours

4) filtered and collected the liquid, and added another round of 300ml 3% acetic acid to the solids.
IMG_7999_new.jpg


5) repeated this to get a total of 3x3 days of soaking. I combined the liquids, reduced a little, filtered out some impurities and basified with sod. carb. I decanted the orange liquid (see picture below) and added more distilled water to wash, repeated this 4 times.
In the image you can see what it looked like after a few washes and the color of the liquid of the first few (2) washes.
IMG_8002_new.jpg


5) I filtered it, let it dry over night (this works well if you take the coffee filter and hang it somewhere, so it can dry from all sides - that is if you don't have a dehydrator. Then I redissolved it in acidified water adding heat to speed up the process, and basified again. Some black insolubles were left behind.

This is the final product before drying:
IMG_8005_new.jpg


6) so I let it dry and scraped and weighed and got a yield of 0.8%, which is about 70% of the yield I got with boiling it 5 times. I am currently doing soak #4 and will follow it with soak #5 to see if I can get the rest of the 30% with this method.
will keep you posted.

Edit:
pulls #4 & #5 yielded another 400mg of alks so yield is up to 1.2% I think this extract is done.

Love
Enoon
 
Hat off to you Enoon-and also to Gibran2 for both your efforts extracting from the vine.Important work indeed-not least for the promise this holds for avoiding the emesis that comes with brewed aya:d
 
Thanks for doing the research! We need more of this sort of thing around here.

My guess is that the more finely divided the caapi, the more easily released the alkaloids - just like powdered MHRB (I never do boils with MHRB, just hot water.)
 
do consider using lye as base since it will entrap less impurities it seems. This way you will have a better idea of how much alks you are consuming if you weigh them. And probably your yield will be a bit higher, since I very likely lost a bunch in the several cleaning steps I had to go through to get pure alks.
Otherwise, yes the cold extraction seems the most energy- and time-efficient, other than the dead time it's just soaking. It's easy and feels cleaner than the boiling, and much more relaxed than any of the other methods.

cheers
 
Enoon, were there any differences noted in initial precipitation purity? Did it require less washes? Cool work man, thank you for sharing this with the community :)
 
using lye it was pure after the first precipitation, nice off-white. using sodium carbonate it was... dark and messy. I didn't compare using lye on the other teks so I don't know if there are any differences.
 
Done with the same caapi vine, each extraction started out with 100g of shredded white caapi from the same vendor, same batch.

From just boiling caapi 5*45min yield was: ~ 1.1-1.3%

From the THP with shredded I got a yield of ~ 0.43%
From the THP with powdered I got a yield of ~ 0.8%

From the cold extract after 3*3days yield is ~ 0.8%
From the cold extract pulls 4 & 5 yielded... ~ 0.4% so total of 1.2% @ 5*3days
 
Does this mean that there is no point in using heat in teks then and the most importance is with how fine the substance you are extracting from is?
 
Well both the cold and the warm extraction have their advantages.

If you are not in a hurry and you have a means to powder your caapi, you can extract alkaloids without using a stove other than for reducing the 5 pulls and maybe a final boil if desired.

If you want your alkaloids within one weekend or so though, then you need to add heat.

using powdered caapi with boiling seems to yield the same amount of alkaloids as leaving it shredded; at least that's what I remember someone saying.
I wonder if the cold tek would have yielded the same if I had not powdered it. If someone has a chance, it would be nice to see a side-by-side for powedered vs shredded for the cold extraction. unfortuantely I've run out of caapi and can't buy it anew at the moment, so someone else will have to follow up on this.
 
Great test En, thanks a lot for sharing!

So hopefully you didnt throw away the THP remains (specially the shredded stuff) and re-extracted it with boiling or something to get the rest of the alkaloids out?

Also, would be nice if you remembered who said that shredded would yield the same if boiling. I wonder also how variable the term "shredded" is, in terms of how thin the pieces are. I know mimosa thick pieces refuse to really let the water through to the inside layers even after long boiling, its definitely less effective than powdering. Maybe caapi is more porous or breaks up easier, but as a general rule I would definitely suggest powdering whatever plant material to maximize efficiency if possible (and if not, shred/break up as fine as possible with other means).

Indeed I would like to hear about some side-by-side tests of shredded vs powder.
 
ya, I did boil the remains of the THP stuff to get the usual 1.2% out of the material in the end. The THP was by far the most wasteful procedure.

I also did an ethanol extraction with 1ßß% ethanol soaked powdered caapi for more than 4 weeks and then extracted the resin to find 0.6% had been extracted, IIRc. Someone in chat said a mix of water and ethanol at a certain ratio is where it's at if you are doing that kind of an extraction, but of course then you have a problem with evaporating it.

That's why so far the cold extraction is my favorite.
 
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