Hi Kash

...an update on the San pedro extraction from a couple weeks ago... after I posted here last time, I went to give the soup a hot water bath - only I left the room and left the hot water going.. i came back and it was just beginning to over flow from the sink, and the flask was in the water with no lid on. The water had turned red and I assumed I'd lost most of it. I took the flask out which was full to the brim and sat it in the shed wondering whether there would be much left. I then went away for a week and when I came back I realised it was still a very dark colour, so I decided to try and salvage some alkaloids out of it.
I divided the liquid into two as the volume had increased to well over a litre. I then mixed a couple tablespoons of cooking salt into around 150ml of boiling water, allowed to sit a couple minutes and then added to one of the lots of liquid. I repeated the same procedure for the other lot of liquid too. I then added 150ml xylene to the soup and mixed thoroughly for about 10 minutes. It began separating immediately.. the salt worked a charm!
I then added around 5-6 drops of hydrochloric acid to 100ml water and mixed with the xylene. my electronic ph meter has started malfunctioning and my buffer solution got dirty so I figured if I can't measure the ph I may as well add more HCL to make sure it wasn't alkaline after contact with the xylene. I mixed for about 5 minutes and then separated the layers, keeping the alk water aside in another flask and returning the xylene to the vessel to do another pull on the soup i'd done the previous pull on. After mixing and separating I added the xylene back to the acidic solution, added one more drop of HCL and then mixed and separated. This time the xylene was kept but added to the other flask of soup.
I ended up doing 2 pulls on each lot of soup. Also, I had already done 1 pull originally and salted the alkaloids before the emulsion problem began on the second pull. So to recap I did one pull on the entire soup (originally 500ml) ..salted out the alks - and the second pull was lost in the sink of water. I then did 2 pulls on each lot of liquid which I had divided and salted all of them with the same lot of 100ml water. I then evapped the water via hairdrier, turning it on the cold setting as the liquid became smaller in volume. I was left with 500mg of light brown crystals which were then washed with anhydrous acetone.. the yield after the wash was basically the same and the acetone was only slightly coloured.
I have done another couple pulls and salted them.. do you think there would be any alks left in them? I used almost 2 ft of cactus.. maybe 50cm
[EDIT] just wondering whether the anti caking agent E535 Sodium ferrocyanide could be undesireable in extractions? It is present in the cooking salt that I added. I tasted a small amount of the alks I yielded and they were extremely bitter and tasted the same as the last mescaline I extracted.
I noticed this time round too, that the alkaloids were a much lighter tan brown as opposed to the greyish colour last time when I evapped in the oven at 100 degrees.. I assume this means the last batch was scorched.. still seems active though I tried a very small amount one evening