Jagube
Established member
A bit less than 2 years ago I brought a Caapi var. caupuri cutting home from the tropics. I grew it indoors and it quickly reached ceiling height. From then on I'd prune it regularly to keep it in check and eat or smoke the pruned leaves. Recently it occurred to me to dry them and collect them in a jar. After collecting ca. 40g of dry leaves (more on that below) I decided to attempt a simple A/B extraction.
The composition of the input material was:
33.6g dried green (i.e. picked from the plant while still green) leaves + 6g dried brown (fallen off) leaves + 15.4g fresh green leaves.
Since roughly 90% of the fresh leaves is water (as confirmed by my own experiments), I count the 15.4g fresh green leaves as 1.54g dried green leaves, which brings the total to around 41.14g, bearing in mind 6g of it was brown (i.e. dead, and presumably less active) leaves.
I did 3 short boils, then filtered, based, acidified, filtered, and based again (with ammonia).
The resulting precipitate was then dried. It weighed just over 1.2g. In places it was hard to scrape off as it stuck to the ceramic dish. It's brown and looks like small burned flakes. I'm assuming it's fairly impure.
Simple Caapi extractions are supposed to be roughly 50% pure, so if mine matches that, it would be a whopping 600mg alks from only 40g dried leaves from an indoor plant, which would mean I could journey with my home-grown Caapi a few times a year.
I'm curious how pure it actually is and what its alkaloid content is. I may bioassay it some time in the coming days.
The composition of the input material was:
33.6g dried green (i.e. picked from the plant while still green) leaves + 6g dried brown (fallen off) leaves + 15.4g fresh green leaves.
Since roughly 90% of the fresh leaves is water (as confirmed by my own experiments), I count the 15.4g fresh green leaves as 1.54g dried green leaves, which brings the total to around 41.14g, bearing in mind 6g of it was brown (i.e. dead, and presumably less active) leaves.
I did 3 short boils, then filtered, based, acidified, filtered, and based again (with ammonia).
The resulting precipitate was then dried. It weighed just over 1.2g. In places it was hard to scrape off as it stuck to the ceramic dish. It's brown and looks like small burned flakes. I'm assuming it's fairly impure.
Simple Caapi extractions are supposed to be roughly 50% pure, so if mine matches that, it would be a whopping 600mg alks from only 40g dried leaves from an indoor plant, which would mean I could journey with my home-grown Caapi a few times a year.
I'm curious how pure it actually is and what its alkaloid content is. I may bioassay it some time in the coming days.
