Is an acid really necessary for boiling plant matter?

[iyiyandiyiy]

It is usually advised to add an acid to the "tea" one makes before an extraction or consumption. Now, I did check San Pedro's raw flesh pH and it's about 4 to 5.
-Does this necessarily imply mescaline is in salt form there?
- If so, it should be already soluble in H2O. Why should it be necessary to acidify the water further?

I do not have the right extraction setup at the moment to do an "acidified v/s non-acidified yield test" for any plants, but I'm interested in knowing whether it is truly necessary, and if so, and why, to acidify the water for Cacti, MHRB and Harmala.

Thanks.

 

[Loveall]

This is a great question. The details of plant extraction are complex, so experiment is king.

You are coreect that many compounds are already in salt form, and therefore acid is not needed to convert them to a salt. However, in general, an acid step does not hurt and may help. Reasons can be varied:

- Lower pH may help breakdown the plant matrix
- Lower pH may lower solubility of unwanted compounds and/or increase solubility of the wanted compounds
- After basifying, a lower pH brew will have a higher ionic strength, helping push alkaloids into the solvent (arguably adding salt can do the same thing).
- Lower pH may help protect/reduce wanted compounds
- The specific acid may act as a cosolvent, enhancing solubility (e.g. vinegar)
- Orther reasons (could be many)

So it depends on the situation. A way to know is to gather data with and without an acid step and compare yields/purity.

 

[doubledog]

Mescaline is very soluble in water in its natural form, no added acid is needed (as cactus is already acidic by itself).
For harmalas, imo that rue seeds or caapi stems are not so acidic, so addition of acid would be helpful for dissolving of alkaloids.

 

[neurobloom]

When cooking a plant material for acid base extraction I cook with spring water then reduce the tea until it gets cloudy from the minerals in the spring water precipitating. Then I proceed with filtration to get a salt saturated solution. Then I base and pull.

Like loveall said this method works just like saturating with table salt minus the sodium bromate contamination in table salt that could cause destructive oxidation of your spice and cause lower yeilds. When I don't have spring water at hand I just boil some Tap water to decompose the bleach in it then cook with it.

 

[AwesomeUsername]

IME a bit of salt and enough of vinegar improves the potency of the tea.

At the end of the boiling procedure you don't really taste either or out. The tea just tastes bitter and soapy at the end.

It kicks in within 45 minutes already, and increases in intensity gradually.

When done only with lemon juice and no salt it worked, but way less potent and it took an eternity to notice the first effects.

I believe mescaline acetate might be the most bioavailable form, and the sea salt just helps pull the alkaloids more easily from cacti flesh into the cooking water.

Is it nessecery? No.

Is it helpful? Definitely!

Edit:
Regarding harmalas it is unclear, non acidified might be equally potent as acidified, but feels less potent because it's longer lasting. The effects are so to say more stretched out.

Mimosa on the other hand works fine without any acid, but unlike chacruna and chalipanga the tannins in mimosa are not really safe to consume or healthy. It won't kill you but it's nasty, thus I would recommend citric acid so the DMT binds to that instead to the tannins and then the gelatine TEK. Tastes better, and works cleaner, potency is unaffected but the sickness is gone.

 

[downwardsfromzero]

like saturating with table salt minus the sodium bromate contamination

Where does one find bromate in table salt? Do you mean iodate, as an iodine supplement? Bromate is carcinogenic and besides that, I see neither a reason why it would be added deliberately nor as any kind of accidental contaminant, natural or otherwise. I'm always willing to learn something new, however.

Iodate would likely cause oxidation of organics too but bear in mind how much is added to the salt (micrograms per gram) compared with the amount of organic material in a crude plant tea.


AwesomeUsername - you put salt and vinegar in your cactus brews for consumption? As if they don't taste bad enough already! Have you tried with just vinegar and no added salt, or vice-versa? Or is it like the potato snacks, where salt and vinegar is an improvement even with salt only being broadly acceptable? Has anyone else noticed the boosted effects from salt + vinegar?

 

[AwesomeUsername]

AwesomeUsername - you put salt and vinegar in your cactus brews for consumption? As if they don't taste bad enough already! Have you tried with just vinegar and no added salt, or vice-versa? Or is it like the potato snacks, where salt and vinegar is an improvement even with salt only being broadly acceptable? Has anyone else noticed the boosted effects from salt + vinegar?

Like mentioned, when it's done it doesn't taste acidic or salty.

My assumption is that vinegar doesn't evaporate but it binds to the alkaloids resulting in not much if any vinegar after-taste.

I didn't messure the amount, but also didn't go easy on it. Still, no sour taste.

It is known that where salt is water follows, it helps to break up a bit the cell walls of cactus. Not much is needed, a pinch will do the trick.

I have tried with just lemon juice and the same batch was considerably less potent, since I tried the salt/vinegar it was my go to recipes because well... it worked, faster and stronger.

I agree that cactus tea is not the tastiest drink there is, but the san Pedro experience is beautiful. That seems like a fair trade.

 

[neurobloom]

Yes I meant iodate my bad

 

[downwardsfromzero]

Bit of a tangent now perhaps, but I recently boiled some chicken bones in strong sodium carbonate solution for several hours. This was supposed to just clean them up a bit for my bone collection but the excessive time and pH of the boil stripped out most of the protein, leaving the bones very crumbly (calcium phosphate being the greater part of the remainder). I wonder if a sodium carbonate boil would do something similar for plant material - cell membranes are a lipoprotein complex even if the cell walls are comprised of cellulose.

This leaves me half-considering an experimental carbonate boil on some candidate plant material, either as a STB variant or, for want of a better term, maybe a B/A/B method; foaming would be annoying with the latter, I suspect. This might be a stupid idea, but I just fancied turning the premise of the thread onto its head to see how the science might come out.

 

[dragonrider]

I have said this in another thread already, but i do suspect that one of the reasons why ayahuasca makes some people vomit, is the acidity of their brews.

Ayahuasca brews tend to be already pretty acidic by themselves because of tannins (especially when chaliponga or mimosa is one of the admixtures), but by adding acetic acid or citric acid, it becomes even more acidic.

I suspect that this realy contributes a lot to stomach issues.

Especially mimosa is already so full of tannins, that i would not be surprised if you could actually use it to tan leather. Traditionally the bark of trees, oak in particular, has been used to tan leather, so this is not realy an extraordinary claim.