Results!
I gave a shot at finding out the utility of extracting harmalas from rue using a microwave and whole seeds. I have now run four extractions with this premise (the first two attempts being failures) and can say, that although it may not be the approach for everyone, I find that there are many advantages that make it worth considering.
In a nut shell, significant time savings over crushing seeds and/or boiling, similar to Jayrocco experienced with boiling whole seeds. I was able to obtain 4.7% and 5% fairly pure harmaline/harmine yields with a couple of hours labor, and a few overnights for soaking/settling/manske chilling.
Yields are about 20% less than mashing/boiling or extended boils with whole seeds. But, there is virtually no mess, no cotton balls or t-shirts. The first boils can be filtered through coffee filters. Only 90 minutes of cooking. Very clean results can be realized with a basify/rinse/manske/manske/basify/rinse and final rinse. I personally would prefer to extract 20% more seeds to avoid the process for crushed seeds.
Process:
- Soak seeds in vinegar acidified water for a few hours
- Freeze seeds
- Defrost in microwave
- Run 6 cooks in microwave at 15 min. each with vinegar acidified water and filter through wire strainer. (I lost about 200ml each cook to steam, so would add 400ml vinegar/water solution to filter off about 200ml from each cook)
- As each cook is filtered, run the solution through a coffee filter 2x
- Basify with a minimum of NaOH, decant and rinse
- Manske in minimum of vinegar and total of 400ml of solution
- Re-dissolve in hot water and Manske again
- Basify with a minimum of NaOH, decant and rinse, decant and rinse (to ph8 )
- Dry in pyrex dish an scrape up final yield
From 4oz (113g) seeds in each case:
