Harmalas extraction: low yield

[northape]

I've got 1.287g of harmala alkaloids from 33g of Syrian Rue which equals to 3.9%, which is quite good since I skipped a lot of step.

It should be enough to test the waters. Congrats

Both you and @reun did a good job. You can't expect a perfect result on your first attempts. It's about not giving up, learning from your mistakes, and enjoying the process.
If you fall in love with harmalas, it'd help big time

 

[doubledog]

- Wait 3 hours for the alkaloid to settle between each wash.
- Keep the water to retrieve carryover losses.

Better would be to wait 12 hours, you do not need to keep water then.
Big container for settling and some patience are only tools needed. The best is to prepare it at the evening and go to sleep.

Squeezing is difficult for bigger amounts of seeds, but should be easy and effective for 33g of them.

 

[Ra-Horakhty]

It should be enough to test the waters. Congrats

Both you and @reun did a good job. You can't expect a perfect result on your first attempts. It's about not giving up, learning from your mistakes, and enjoying the process.
If you fall in love with harmalas, it'd help big time

Better would be to wait 12 hours, you do not need to keep water then.
Big container for settling and some patience are only tools needed. The best is to prepare it at the evening and go to sleep.

Squeezing is difficult for bigger amounts of seeds, but should be easy and effective for 33g of them.

Thank you northape and doubledog.
Thanks also to reun, his post motivated me to do my first extraction.

I'll wait 12 hours next time as doubledog mentioned.

I noticed that harmala alkaloids settles faster after each wash, maybe it can go something like this : 12 hours of settle time after adding the base, 9 hours for the first wash, 6 hours for the second one, 3 hours for the third one and fourth one.

And I've got an idea to make the filtration process way faster after all the boils.

I noticed yesterday when I tried to filter a little bit of the harmala water with a cotton plugged in a funnel that the non desired plant residues get stuck in the cotton so I came up with a filtration idea : Why not putting a lot of cotton balls in the harmala containing water untill they absorbs all the water, put them in a group of 3/4 in a french press, squeeze as much water as possible (I noticed that squeezing the cotton would not leak the plant residues accumulated in it), then add some vinegar to the cottons, squeeze again to extract as much alkaloids that would be stuck in the cotton.

 

[doubledog]

In general, lot of time during harmala extraction is dedicated to sleep (since you need to wait, whole procedure takes some days)

There are 2 very important steps in harmala extraction which are best done while sleeping

1. First alkaline sedimentation
2. Filtration after reacidification of sedimented harmalas.

Attempts to speed up both of them are frustrating and should be avoided.