Help With Extraction

[stuartroelke]

I was following this guide on Erowid so that I could start learning how to extract my homegrown salvia. Mistakes were definitely made

Defatting was going well, but then I realized that I had completely forgotten to deal with the tannins—I essentially let the alcohol dry down to a waxy / oily goo and then immediately started defatting with naptha.

After the final defat, I had this extremely stupid idea that I could redissolve the salvinorin A just by pouring the naptha out and pouring alcohol in—I imagined the naptha magically floating to the top (this would have been similar to the alcohol wash step if I had actually understood what I was doing).

To make matters worse, I stirred the alcohol with the naptha / salvinorin A / tannin mix and ended up with a gross emulsion—like peanut butter. I've never dealt with an emulsion before; it makes sense why many warn of this with other teks. I managed to scrape most of the emulsion off my stirring utensils and back into the jar. Some was lost, and I fear it was likely concentrated with salvinorin.

After five days of refusing to deal with it: I see no visible naptha floating on the surface, the ethanol is light brown / green (probably with both waxes and salvinorin A dissolved into it), and there are still smears of emulsion around the sides of the jar. Something has settled to the bottom, but it could be any combination of emulsion and the tannins I had hoped to remove.

Should I pour off the alcohol, evaporate the jar with the emulsion in order to fully remove the naptha, scrape that powder back into the alcohol, and then let the tannins settle so that I can remove them? Then I can evaporate the already defatted alcohol extraction?

 

[stuartroelke]

Update: I ended up pouring off the alcohol into a different jar because I figured it couldn’t hurt. Here’s what settled to the bottom after three days. It actually doesn’t smell like naptha—the alcohol that I poured off smells more like naptha—this smells really good and clean. I have no idea what it is aside from tannins that settled and whatever salvinorin emulsion stuck to the bottom.

Plan is still to dry this and add it back to the alcohol mixture so that I can get the tannins to settle out, then evaporate it all and find out what I’m left with.

 

[stuartroelke]

Update: I think that was mostly tannins and some sort of emulsified oil, wax, or fat—ended up adding warm alcohol to melt it, stirred for a long time, let the large chunks fall to the bottom (maybe 30 minutes), added that to the other jar with the alcohol extract (which had significantly less tannins), let it settle for sixteen hours, poured off everything sans sediment, and now I think I have primarily salvinorin A, some wax, and chlorophyll. I’ll probably do another few naptha defats and then I’ll post where I’m at.

 

[stuartroelke]

Update: Got ~40g of dried leaf mostly purified to ~200mg (maybe less) salvinorin A crystals. Today I dissolved all of it in hot alcohol (95%) and am now drying on 1g of dried plain leaf (see image).

For anyone wondering, I believe my major issue lies in the fact that I opted for 95% alcohol during the initial extraction. Ice cold acetone would have picked up significantly less wax. Also, the alcohol washes and general precipitation can be done at room temp—freezing cold alcohol will cause impurities to settle with the crystalline dust. I opted to freeze precipitate only once the alcohol was only the slightest bit green (as you can see along the margins in the image below).

This is obviously excessive for enhancing leaf, but I wanted to push the process as far as possible so that I can repeat these steps for a tincture once I’ve grown another ~50g of leaves.

 

[stuartroelke]