psilocybin
Rising Star
Any questions or problems you may run into during an extraction can be asked to get other members input in this thread.
Entropymancer said:Mimosa really likes to form emulsions.
When you say "shake it", do you mean like a moderate swirling, or like actual shaking? I've seen some teks that say "shake vigorously"... this is not what you want to do!
The problem is that the aqueous phase isn't sufficiently polar. You need to increase the ionic strength of your solution. Try adding a whole bunch of salt (non-Iodized) (30 gram per liter of water if you want to be precise... adding too much is no problem at all, so no worries there), and warming the mixture up. This should help the seperation go much more quickly. If you just wait for it to seperate, it will take days.
The conventional wisdom here is that you need more lye, but as 69Ron has pointed out, that makes no sense; the only benefit that the lye can be providing is increasing the ionic strength of the solution. This is much cheaper to do with salt than lye.
Entropymancer said:The conventional wisdom here is that you need more lye, but as 69Ron has pointed out, that makes no sense; the only benefit that the lye can be providing is increasing the ionic strength of the solution. This is much cheaper to do with salt than lye.
Noman said:Yeah, but my friend has tried it with 60g salt added per liter and there are still horrible emulsions to deal with until at least pH 13 is achieved.
Once one hits 13, you can shake the shit out of it and there's no emulsion at all.
Ambient said:What's going on?
Entropymancer said:Damn, really? My friend was thinking about trying to develope a lye-free process, since it's such a watched chemical with the "fight against meth" these days. He still has access to sodium hydoxide that can be bought w/ cash, would like to be able to break the MHRB extractor's dependence on this caustic base.
Maybe by saturating the solution with salt after an aqueous acidic extract, a defat might net more impurities and decrease the emulsions?