I like the crock-pot tek ! And I just wonder how good your bark was - did you get a value for %-yeild..?...     And of course I have some thoughts about pH... it's worth measuring. I noticed you didn't have a pH pen to borrow..? You kjust need to use one once to learn the amounts needed.    Since all the dmt present in the aqueous, acid extract will become insoluble at pH 11.2, a pH of 11.5 is already over kill.  Lye is hard to come by these days, so waste not !     One can pre-dissolve it as a concenrate in water warmed up in the microwave, so you can use a small volume. For eg just 5 tsp in 250 ml makes a strong enough lye-solution to need just 30 ml to basify-to-Jet-black, a whole litre at pH 2.    So repeating myself, a pH of 11.5 is basified enough. The use of any more lye to go past pH 11.2 is just not needed anyways. So I'm wondering; the value of pH = 13.5 comes from where..? A pH of 13.5 is screamingly high, and sometimes it's even  hard to read reliably.       Cheap pH pens loose their calibration and accuracy at the limit of their range (pH  1 - 14), same with the acid extreme - , with uncalibrated pH pens you can overshoot  by large amounts in trying to make a pH 13.5 or pH 1.5, beware. ... 13.5 can be an imaginary number, as we shovel the lye on in ...     The 'chemistry' reason to save your lye, and for not needing to exceed a pH of 11.2 - 11.5 is because dmt has a pKa of 8.7 ... so we just need to exceed the pKa of dmt by about 2.5 pH points to be sure that ALL the dmt becomes insoluble. 2.5 pH points above 8.7 is more than [b:ecf46dea9a]100 times[/b:ecf46dea9a] 'extra' base already !  'Basifying' is not the same as digesting the MHRB with a lye stew (at ph 13.5), as in an STB tek ...     Try to borrow a (calibrated !) pH pen to measure the pH of when it turns  "slippy black" - 11.0 to 11.2 is easy to note, but stir in the lye solution. At pH 10.0 it's still all grey and cloudy-blue. You can calibrate your tek with a pH pen, and learn to eyeball the exact amounts needed.    Also, continuing to rant about not using too much lye;  if one used a lesser amount of acid ( for eg 2 ml of HCl per liter vs 5ml/L) then you'll need less lye - basifying an extract with a pH of 4, needs [b:ecf46dea9a]100 times LESS[/b:ecf46dea9a] lye than extracting at a pH of 2.0.     So compared to using HCL at pH 1.8,  acetic acid at pH 4.0 needs just a teeny weeny amount of lye to move it to pH 11.5 - I bet less than a gram of lye per liter will work. In another approx example - just 3 grams of  lye dissolved in 20 ml H2O,  raises pH in  1 litre of filtered acid extract at pH 1.8, all the way to pH 12 !  Lye is as 'strong' of a base as HCL is a 'strong-acid', you need just a 'titch'...