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Defatting/Purifying San Pedro Resin

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For an still wet resin, would 99% solvent work well? Or is it advisable to add some additional water to get it down to, say, 80%?
Strong enough alcohol might be capable of dehydrating those dendritic polysaccharides so it's a question of whether you're looking for that effect, and also how wet your still-wet resin actually is relative to the intended ratio of resin and alcohol.

I'm fairly confident of that hypothesis, but it's still untested and therefore yet to be falsified or proven.
 
dehydrating those dendritic polysaccharides so it's a question of whether you're looking for that effect
What would that imply?

So far I'm going with about 80% IPA, and leave experimentation for later. @doubledog , for how long do you usually let it sit in the freezer? Or, do you do something else afterwards? After a night in the freezer, my IPA solution has become cloudy, but it's staying as a suspension. I have tried filtering it, however the IPA is so cold it won't go through any filter, I didn't want to let it warm up in case the precipitate will dissolve again.

Likely I'm just being impatient and it needs more time.
 
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Interesting, I've always kept it in freezer for at least 24 hours or more and never had any suspension. I believe that a lot depends on exact proportions od water, alcohol and plant material.
After freezing, I've always had a sediment/precipitate which was very easy to decant liquid from. I most often used ethanol, but used IPA once and effects was the same. Maybe you could try adding more IPA.

I would also try to rewarm it up and then freeze it again.
 
I have added some more IPA, it's likely the ratio of it got too low, as it took hours to filter (the filters I was using are probably too fine) and likely a lot of IPA evaporated. If for whatever reason I can't separate it I'll just let it redissolve and dry. I was happy enough with the resin already, so this should be fine too.
 
Yes, dark honey like material, but harder. Sticky when not fully dehydrated, hygroscopic.
I did it on normally extracted resin.
Btw. my reason for freezing it after adding alcohol was to precipitate mescaline from the solution, but inactive material separated out instead.
 
I did it on normally extracted resin.
Btw. my reason for freezing it after adding alcohol was to precipitate mescaline from the solution, but inactive material separated out instead.
I think that may be why very little is precipitating for me, I did it following the "Resin Update" way, and there are way less pectins etc. to begin with. I'm skipping the freezer step on a second extraction and it's coming along fine, looks the same as the first. Also, the precipitate from the first one tasted bitter, so I'm a bit worried that it may contain some actives. It was so little that I have decided it's not worth it for me.

If full spectrum resin is the goal, it's much more practical imo to start with alcohol maceration, not with boiling it in water.
Would this work with fresh cactus?
 
It's definitely very variable, depends on cactus, method of extraction, proportions and so on. All this alcohol adding is just playin g with different solubilities of pectins, alkaloids, malic acid or some salts.
It would need some rigorous approach to find out every variable.

Would this work with fresh cactus?
Not so much, main advantages is low volume. You can macerate 50g of dried powder in 500ml of alcohol (almost no swelling there), so with 3 pulls you end up with not so high volume of solution to evaporate.
 
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Not so much, main advantages is low volume. You can macerate 50g of dried powder in 500ml of alcohol (almost no swelling there), so with 3 pulls you end up with not so high volume of solution to evaporate
Ofc, there is then another problem of extracted chlorophyl (mentioned by modern), so another cleaning step with dissolving in water is needed. Full spectrum is quite complicated approach. 😁
 
Thanks for all the info and help, @doubledog . Another question: what doses do you usually take of this purified resin, and/or to what percentage of mescaline is it equivalent (subjectively, not the actual percentage which, as you said, may be lower)? I'm aware results may vary, it's just to get a rough idea.

By the way, I tried using a concentration likely to be much higher than 80%, using a good amount of IPA for a very thick reduced syrup. It doesn't seem to be a good idea: pectins precipitated immediately, forming a single big blob. That blob was very thick, like the texture of used chewing gum, and seemed to have a lot of alkaloids trapped, as it was brown instead of white. Mashing it up with water and adding more IPA helped extract some of that darkness, but I was unable to make it white. So indeed it seems much better to use close to 80% IPA.
 
I found out that it's better for low dose experience, so I would usually take 2- 3g of resin, which could be 100-150mg mescaline equivalent. In higher doses, I always got some unpleasant body load effects (mainly some kind of strange muscle tension), so prefer isolated mescaline for higher doses.

Edit: My extraction of purified resin yielded 8% of mescaline.

Yes, this chewing gum blob is typical, it's better to do it while warm and add alcohol slowly in small increments while mixing to not allow creation of big unpenetrable blob of mucilage. Mashing it with fork, adding little water and similar measures helps.
 
I found out that it's better for low dose experience, so I would usually take 2- 3g of resin, which could be 100-150mg mescaline equivalent. In higher doses, I always got some unpleasant body load effects (mainly some kind of strange muscle tension), so prefer isolated mescaline for higher doses.
In my case I got no negative effects from a high dose of the crude resin, so I suppose that won't change with the purified resin. It's probably related to differences in the person, the cactus material, or both.

Yes, this chewing gum blob is typical, it's better to do it while warm and add alcohol slowly in small increments while mixing to not allow creation of big unpenetrable blob of mucilage. Mashing it with fork, adding little water and similar measures helps.
That's what I will do from now on. I added it too fast, probably.

All in all, I think this is an excellent tek, and probably deserves its own write-up :)
 
In my case I got no negative effects from a high dose of the crude resin, so I suppose that won't change with the purified resin. It's probably related to differences in the person, the cactus material, or both.
What I meant is that resin (either purified or not) causes this effect in me. I have no doubt that it's individual as muscle tension is problem for me my whole life.
But I do not get it with mescaline.

All in all, I think this is an excellent tek, and probably deserves its own write-up
I just dried 60 g of cactus, so maybe I will write it up and share here.
 
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