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Help with Acacia Bark - I didn't get all of it

SvensonTheFreshMaker

Esteemed member
Hi all,

I attempted my first extraction using chatgpt to guide me. I started with 300g of shredded AARB (Broadleaf), and put it in 3.5lt of 3.8ph water that I acidified with vinegar, and let it soak for 24 hours. I then added salt and basified the soup with sodium hydroxide to 13.5ph, heated it to 50c in a sous vide bath, and added naptha (shellite) and did 5 or 6 pulls, evaporated around half the volume and into the deep freezer. I ended up with less than a gram of white crystals.
I found this forum after I started the chatgpt process, and after much reading, I have come to realize that I may have F'd up. a 24 hour room temp soak won't break down the shredded root bark enough. The chatgpt instructions was only doing the acid bath as a step to remove fats and lipids or some nonsense, and was actually showing me STB instructions, hence the 3.5l of water which as I understand, is an excess.

My question is, what do I do now? The basified soup with all the solids in it, has been sitting overnight, so I think whatever DMT is in the liquid would be polymerized by now, but I don't think I got it all out of the bark. Here's my options as I see it:

Can I re acidify it to turn the DMT back into a salt, then PC the whole lot?,
If I do this, can I boil the liquid down so I don't have so much, and would I do this before or after acidifying?,

Should I drain the liquid off first and introduce fresh acid water before PC?,
Will the table salt I added cause issues if I do this?

I'm pretty happy that I got white crystals, I mustn't be totally retarded. Some of the equipment I have if this helps: Accurate digital Ph meter, stainless pressure cooker 10psi, vacuum chamber, sous vide, various refractometers, and a beuchner funnel with various filter bed media.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
Shelitte doesn't pull that well, if you heat the soup enough it'll hold more but may result in goo. You can also try pulling with xylene and evap to get the rest out but you will get goo. Which you can use to make changa.
You could trying salting it out of the xylene (more sustainable) or re-xing the goo. Otherwise it can be tricking to get everything out of AARB.
 
I think next time, use your pressure cooker at the acid phase and give your bark a good boil for an hour. Strain the resulting tea through a sieve and toss the bark back into the pot for another hour-long cook. Repeat one more time if you feel it's necessary. At this point, you can throw out the bark. Boil your acidic bark tea down to a workable amount of liquid and proceed according to plan....
 
Well Sheeet - the hail mary pull I did before bed actually yielded. I ended up with more than I thought:

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I guess that's still a shit return, 1.266g from 300g = 0.422%, but it shows that there's still alkaloids to be had.

Thanks for the recommendation to throw it, but there still be DMT in that soup. I'm happy to re crystalize goo with shellite. Do you think I should heat it and go for goo, or try re acidifying, and PC? I'm more after a "yes, you can re acidify freebase DMT to turn it back into a salt without any loss" or something along those lines.
 
Shelitte doesn't pull that well, if you heat the soup enough it'll hold more but may result in goo. You can also try pulling with xylene and evap to get the rest out but you will get goo. Which you can use to make changa.
You could trying salting it out of the xylene (more sustainable) or re-xing the goo. Otherwise it can be tricking to get everything out of AARB.
Thanks for the reply, what is "salting it out of the xylene"?
 
You can combined certain salts to bind to the freebase dmt that form a dmt salt. Certain salts can form in xylene but aren't soluble in xylene and they crash out. Meaning no evaporating solvents.
Its up to you what you want to do with the salt forms.
 
You can combined certain salts to bind to the freebase dmt that form a dmt salt. Certain salts can form in xylene but aren't soluble in xylene and they crash out. Meaning no evaporating solvents.
Its up to you what you want to do with the salt forms.
Okay, so in practical language - do a pull with xylene, add some acidic water ph2-4 to the xylene, shake it, remove the xylene for another use, basify the acidic water to 12ph with the now DMT salt now in it, add shellite, shake, seperate, freeze, bob's your uncle, fanny's your aunt. Is that about right?
 
No.
Simply you can just do an extra pull with xylene (after the naphtha) don't stress if it mixes with a little left of naphtha from previous pulls. Then you can separate the xyelene and evap for freebase dmt oil.

However, if you want to be sustainable, instead of evaporating the xylene you can separate the (dmt loaded) xylene and add a salt [an acid] i.e citric acid that will form a dmt citrate (the salt form) and crash out of the xylene. HOWEVER, that's an example I'm not sure off the top of my head of the solubility of citric acid in xylene nor if it forms dmt citrate and or crashes out in xylene. You would have to research the forum and see what salt form is compatible.
 
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Okay, so in practical language - do a pull with xylene, add some acidic water ph2-4 to the xylene, shake it, remove the xylene for another use, basify the acidic water to 12ph with the now DMT salt now in it, add shellite, shake, seperate, freeze, bob's your uncle, fanny's your aunt. Is that about right?
Yes this would work too. Be gentle with the shaking, swirling and rolling should be enough, do multiple washes with some acidic water instead of 1 big one.

Regarding your current situation, you can let it sit some more and the base will brake down the plant material and liberate some of the leftover dmt. If you can let it evaporte some, in a gentle way without boiling, maybe using the sousvide, this will probably make the pulls more efficient. It's ok if it polimerises bcz you can backsalt it and base and pull again and that should solve it. And yeah use xylene for the next pulls as _Trip_ suggested.

Using chatgpt to help is fine, but you should have a good understanding of the process first. It's great you got good results first time, congrats!
 
Yes this would work too. Be gentle with the shaking, swirling and rolling should be enough, do multiple washes with some acidic water instead of 1 big one.

Regarding your current situation, you can let it sit some more and the base will brake down the plant material and liberate some of the leftover dmt. If you can let it evaporte some, in a gentle way without boiling, maybe using the sousvide, this will probably make the pulls more efficient. It's ok if it polimerises bcz you can backsalt it and base and pull again and that should solve it. And yeah use xylene for the next pulls as _Trip_ suggested.

Using chatgpt to help is fine, but you should have a good understanding of the process first. It's great you got good results first time, congrats!
Thanks bud. I tried a back salt. Its surprising how much the xylene basifies the acid water. I had to do 4 washes with 2ph acid water before the collection jar went below 3ph with 200ml of xylene and 500ml of acid water. I guess i could iust get the ph of the acid water lower next time. Its crystalysing now after washing the basified water with 2 pulls of shellite, but I had a quick peek when i pulled tea out of the freezer, and i can see some pure white crystals forming. Good sign. I think i might skip the shellite pulls next time and go stright to a xylene backsalt after basifying in the a/b tek. Unless there's a reason as to not?
 
Thanks bud. I tried a back salt. Its surprising how much the xylene basifies the acid water. I had to do 4 washes with 2ph acid water before the collection jar went below 3ph with 200ml of xylene and 500ml of acid water. I guess i could iust get the ph of the acid water lower next time. Its crystalysing now after washing the basified water with 2 pulls of shellite, but I had a quick peek when i pulled tea out of the freezer, and i can see some pure white crystals forming. Good sign. I think i might skip the shellite pulls next time and go stright to a xylene backsalt after basifying in the a/b tek. Unless there's a reason as to not?
that sounds great, yes it should be fine pulling with xylene first.

the increase in the pH of the acidic water is a good indicator that dmt is migrating to it. if excessive acid was needed, it could also be some of the base soup or small particles of it were pulled with the xylene, which is fine as you're backsalting. at the point where the acid wash pH does not increase anymore, it means the xylene got depleted and you can move on with the next steps.
 
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Ah, that makes sense. The ph was still rising quite a bit with the last wash. Luckily I threw the xylene back into the soup. Ill get the rest of it in the next pull. I also noticed that it was very resistant to forming emultions at both the xylene and shellite steps, so I used my stir plate at max for 10 minutes for each step. Chemistry is awesome.
 
Aright, final weights are in after going down the xylene backsalt path. I did 2 xylene and backsalts. I did the first one just as a test to see if my process was right. Both times yeilded lovely white crystals. In hind sight i should have just done more xylene pulls instead of doing the whole thing twice. 2.505g from 300g of aarb, making it 0.835% extraction. I'm happy with that for my first time, and from what I've read, seems to be within an acceptable yeild from aarb. Ill probably do a recrystallisation in shellite to get rid of some red bits. It could just be polymerased dmt, but I would hate to inhale caustic soda, so id rather just do a easy extra step. This is already more material than i will need for ages. Thanks for the help y'all, much appreciated.
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