Here's my method. It still needs a lot of work. If you have any ideas, please do write them up.
200g rue seeds are ground.
Seed powder is put in a pot and covered with vinegar.
This mixture is simmered for a while.
The mixture is allowed to cool so that it does not hurt to touch.
The mixture is poured through a muslin cloth into a vessel.
The seed powder in the muslin cloth is squeezed dry.
The exhausted powder is set aside to be dealt with later...Perhaps I will use it as plant food for rue seedlings.
1L NaCl saturated solution is prepared with room temperature water.
A vessel is prepared with a marking at the 1L line. I put two pieces of duct tape on a 1gal jar, one piece marking the surface level of 1L and the other marking the meniscus level of 1L. Additionally, a rubber band was secured about the circumference of the jar for ez reading.
The rue water is mixed with the NaCl saturated water. In the newly prepared vessel.
The liquid in the vessel is heated until reduced near the 1L mark. For me, this meant putting the jar in a very large pot on top of a rag. This would have gone a lot quicker had I contrived to put the entire solution in a pot instead of a 1gal glass jar. Out of impatience, I removed the jar from the pot with upwards of 500mL liquid above the 1L mark.
The vessel is allowed to cool. I left it on a top shelf and forgot about it for 2 days.
Once cool, the mixture is swished about and poured through a gold filter. Red Xtals are collected in the filter, the liquid passes through easily. This is the part that took me all of 20 seconds.
The liquid can be added back into the vessel to allow for more xtals to precipitate.
The filter is turned upside down and smacked against the bottom of a new vessel to collect the captured xtals from the filter. This was actually a mistake, see the next step.
The filter is held over the xtal collection vessel and hot water is poured through it to dissolve any xtals that didn't get smacked out. Some solids and goos will remain in the filter. This material can be discarded.
More hot water is added to the xtals and the mixture is heated until all xtals present have dissolved. I added some isopropyl alcohol at this point. That was probably a mistake as the harmala xtals should be completely soluble in plain water. The addition of iso might cause more impurities to get dissolved. This is bad, see next step.
Some material will not dissolve even after heat and agitation is applied. This material is removed by sending the hot liquid through the gold filter again.
The liquid is poured into a dish and evaporated. I did this at room temperature for nice'n'spiky xtals but the same could be accomplished on a double boiler.
Alternately, don't evaporate the liquid and precede to step one for further purification.
Yield so far is 18g. That's out of 200g seeds and it looks as though I'll get another 2g out of the liquid in my 1gal jar that is slowly evaporating, towards the 1L mark, at room temperature. 20g out of 200g is 10%. Erowid lists 7% as high harmala content for rue. Assuming that my seeds are high yielding at 7% dry weight, that would mean my extract is only 70% pure. It seems worthwhile to repeat this process a few times in order to determine if I have super ultra active seeds or if the extract is really 30% or plus impurities.
As you can see, I already have many critiques for myself. I know there are a slew that I am not even considering. Any question? Hit me!
I'd really like to get this process streamlined as much as possible. It's already fairly quick to complete a single manske but if it were even easier, I'd do several of them every time just to get nice clear xtals -- a product that can be dosed with great accuracy.
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