I bought 50 grams of whole jurema root bark a couple of months ago. One of my goals with psychedelics, at least the kind that go into your body, is to treat them as genuine food as much as I can, so chemistry-based extraction techniques don't interest me. Instead I've been playing around with things like the eggstraction technique for soaking up the tannins, but haven't had much luck. Part of my problem is that I have a naturally high tolerance to most psychedelics I've tried, to the point where once a friend tried to keep up with me and went on a million year spirit journey while I just sat and pet my cat and watched over him. This makes it hard to tell if the issue might be lost potency or an undersized dose. I'm not keen on pissing off my jurema or burning through it too quickly, so I've been looking for ways to increase the potency, not the dose. In my introductory post I mentioned that I was interested in experimenting with fermentation-based extraction techniques, and that is what gave me my first success with jurema. Here's how I did it:
1. I ground 5 grams of the whole root bark in my mortar and pestle. Next time I'll go up to 7.
2. I put several cranks of freshly ground black pepper in the jurema powder. Black pepper is known for increasing the absorbtion of nutrients in a wide variety of foods, so this seemed like a no-brainer. Because I had them I also broke open some lion's mane/chaga/reishi/cordyceps/turkey tail/shiitake/maitake supplement pills I had and included them in the jurema mix.
3. I gently simmered the jurema mix in a stainless pot with a small amount of filtered water down to a thin sludge once. The point here isn't extraction, but sterilization to protect the cultures in the fermentation stage.
4. I took a bottle of GT's Island Bliss kombucha, which I chose because it has passionfruit in it, which my research has suggested may have mild MAOI activity, and I drank enough to make room. I let the bottle sit uncovered to let the CO2 escape to reduce the chance of a foam up, and then I put in the jurema sludge.
5. I also put in several drops of fulvic acid for the same reason I put in the black pepper, and then some sugar to kickstart the cultures since there wasn't a full scoby growing.
6. I put the kombucha into the fridge and let it ferment for several days. I regularly shook it around to disturb the sediment and make sure as much of the jurema was exposed as possible.
7. On the day I drank it I used a coarse wire mesh to filter out the gross particles and then used a spoon to smoosh as much out of them as I could.
When I drank the jurema I used a RIMA that might count as a research chem, so I won't name it. It's very old and well studied, but it's enough of a grey area that I'll just play it safe unless a mod is interested and talks to me about it. I'm only mentioning this in case it winds up being relevant because this RIMA is known for having anti-microbial properties, and cell apoptosis in the cultures might be part of my result.
The kombucha tasted nice, with only a slight taste of the purge.
I'm unsure how long it took to hit because I don't typically get strong visuals on psychedelics. Instead I turn into a poetry spitting machine, and most of my inner realizations get expressed that way. The best way I can describe the experience is that the drink itself was some amalgam of all the life that had gone into it, and that temporary spirit sat down and talked to me. It told me the story of how man first discovered True language, and how this was a story passed down for tens of thousands of years among the plants because we are some of the few animals in history that have learned the philosophy of speech as they have, though our methods are different. It makes us interesting to them in the same way that anything dangerous is interesting, but the focus is on the interest, not the alarm. An important thing to note is that because they can't move, plants like to think of us as their agents, or wish to make us their agents, and their intentions aren't always benevolent.
There's more I can talk about with the experience I had, but except to describe my results I'm getting off topic. I am unsure if just leaving the jurema in water in my fridge for several days would produce a similar result. I note that there was only a small suggestion of a purge, which I have seen other people report with cold alkaline extractions, but kombucha is an acidic extraction, which I believe is supposed to produce the largest purge? I'm uncertain. In the future I also want to experiment with using ultrasonic jewelry cleaners to speed up the extraction, both in cold water and in kombucha. I'm also interested in fermenting amanita muscaria sometime down the line.
As a side note I don't tend to take systematic approaches to this kind of thing. I wait until a recipe bubbles up inside of me, and I've learned that trusting that intuition leads to very good things in my life. I would be thrilled if someone with the time and resources for a systematic approach wanted to look at the idea, but as it is I'm happy following my meandering path.
1. I ground 5 grams of the whole root bark in my mortar and pestle. Next time I'll go up to 7.
2. I put several cranks of freshly ground black pepper in the jurema powder. Black pepper is known for increasing the absorbtion of nutrients in a wide variety of foods, so this seemed like a no-brainer. Because I had them I also broke open some lion's mane/chaga/reishi/cordyceps/turkey tail/shiitake/maitake supplement pills I had and included them in the jurema mix.
3. I gently simmered the jurema mix in a stainless pot with a small amount of filtered water down to a thin sludge once. The point here isn't extraction, but sterilization to protect the cultures in the fermentation stage.
4. I took a bottle of GT's Island Bliss kombucha, which I chose because it has passionfruit in it, which my research has suggested may have mild MAOI activity, and I drank enough to make room. I let the bottle sit uncovered to let the CO2 escape to reduce the chance of a foam up, and then I put in the jurema sludge.
5. I also put in several drops of fulvic acid for the same reason I put in the black pepper, and then some sugar to kickstart the cultures since there wasn't a full scoby growing.
6. I put the kombucha into the fridge and let it ferment for several days. I regularly shook it around to disturb the sediment and make sure as much of the jurema was exposed as possible.
7. On the day I drank it I used a coarse wire mesh to filter out the gross particles and then used a spoon to smoosh as much out of them as I could.
When I drank the jurema I used a RIMA that might count as a research chem, so I won't name it. It's very old and well studied, but it's enough of a grey area that I'll just play it safe unless a mod is interested and talks to me about it. I'm only mentioning this in case it winds up being relevant because this RIMA is known for having anti-microbial properties, and cell apoptosis in the cultures might be part of my result.
The kombucha tasted nice, with only a slight taste of the purge.
I'm unsure how long it took to hit because I don't typically get strong visuals on psychedelics. Instead I turn into a poetry spitting machine, and most of my inner realizations get expressed that way. The best way I can describe the experience is that the drink itself was some amalgam of all the life that had gone into it, and that temporary spirit sat down and talked to me. It told me the story of how man first discovered True language, and how this was a story passed down for tens of thousands of years among the plants because we are some of the few animals in history that have learned the philosophy of speech as they have, though our methods are different. It makes us interesting to them in the same way that anything dangerous is interesting, but the focus is on the interest, not the alarm. An important thing to note is that because they can't move, plants like to think of us as their agents, or wish to make us their agents, and their intentions aren't always benevolent.
There's more I can talk about with the experience I had, but except to describe my results I'm getting off topic. I am unsure if just leaving the jurema in water in my fridge for several days would produce a similar result. I note that there was only a small suggestion of a purge, which I have seen other people report with cold alkaline extractions, but kombucha is an acidic extraction, which I believe is supposed to produce the largest purge? I'm uncertain. In the future I also want to experiment with using ultrasonic jewelry cleaners to speed up the extraction, both in cold water and in kombucha. I'm also interested in fermenting amanita muscaria sometime down the line.
As a side note I don't tend to take systematic approaches to this kind of thing. I wait until a recipe bubbles up inside of me, and I've learned that trusting that intuition leads to very good things in my life. I would be thrilled if someone with the time and resources for a systematic approach wanted to look at the idea, but as it is I'm happy following my meandering path.
