Apoc said:
I'm having trouble understanding. Why does the tek call fora an addition of NaOH to initially precipitate, then call for an acidification followed by another precipitation with NaOH? Why not just one precipitation? Can CaOH be used instead of NaOH? Or sodium carbonate?
Would you suggest a particular method if one wanted a tincture instead of freebase? A tincture that wouldn't have to be kept in the fridge.
The caapi brew initially contains a cloudy mix of alkaloid salts and plant fibers and particles.
The first basification pulls all of the alkaloids out of solution. The liquid is removed and you’re left with alkaloids plus insoluble plant material. So how do we separate the alkaloids from the insoluble plant material? We put the alkaloids back into solution.
One way to do this is to acidify the alkaloids. Another way is to add a solvent, such as IPA (but I’m not sure if all of the alkaloids are completely soluble in IPA, and there may be some inert plant material that is soluble). Once the alkaloids are back in solution, we can separate them from the insoluble material.
If you don’t mind the vinegar flavor/smell of acetates, then I suppose you could boil down the alkaloid solution to a small volume, maybe add a bit of ethanol as a preservative, and you’d have a nice tincture ready to go.
The second basification is to get the alkaloids back to freebase form (and to further purify by removing any remaining soluble impurities). I use NaOH because it’s an excellent base, and sodium salts of acids (such as sodium acetate) are generally very soluble. Calcium hydroxide isn’t a good choice because of solubility of calcium salts (I think). Sodium carbonate might work – only one way to know for sure: try it!
The nice thing about this TEK is that it uses only water as a solvent and yields a very clean product. If you do an alcohol extraction of caapi, you’ll probably not get as good a yield (caapi soaking in alcohol is not going to release its alkaloids as readily as caapi in boiling acidified water). Also, alcohol will pull out plant oils, resins, chlorophyll, gums, tars – any and all lipids that are soluble in alcohol. You will not get a very pure product.