I'm pulling with purified heptane, or rather Bestine that I ran though a distillation column. I've noticed that it distills at 93°C, 5 degrees lower than the boiling point of n-heptane, so I suspect it's actually an azeotrope of heptane isomers. (I don't actually know if heptane forms an azeotrope with its own isomers, but that's my best guess. Otherwise, what is being sold as 99.9% pure heptane is actually mostly 3-ethylpentane. Either way, it seems to work great for extracting as white of xtals as I've ever seen.)

This yellow goo is very unusual for me, because I never got it prior to using the pressure cooker. It almost seems like the PC had the opposite effect, and actually caused my spice to polymerize more. Or, like I said, it liberated plant fats that I didn't used to have to deal with, and I'm now struggling to remove. What's strange is that my first pulls tend to be cleaner and whiter, and get smaller and dirtier as I go.

Regardless, I'm now pondering my next move for my mini-A/B. Should I dissolve this product back into a small amount of heptane, and then wash that with acid to get it into aqueous solution? Goal there is to eliminate nonpolars that don't form an ascorbate salt. Or should I just go straight to mixing it with water and seeing how much acid it takes to dissolve it all?

Maybe I'll do the latter, since I can calculate how much ascorbic acid it "should" take to turn all this into salt. Then I can filter off whatever doesn't dissolve. That seems like a more reliable way to separate nonpolar contaminants?