Pictorial Guide to Caapi Vine Alkaloid Extraction

[Nitegazer]

Hey fellow extractors,

I'm in the middle of an extraction based on this method, but started with 100g powdered yellow caapi. In the interest of capturing all the alkaloids, I lysed the heck out of it: vinegar/water soak for 6 hours, followed by freezing, and then 15 min boils for each pull.

When I first tried to basify, the color changes in solution indicated that the reactions were going as expected. Unforunately, very little fell out of solution. After an overnight, only a thin coating of alks on the bottom of my vessel.

I suspected that oils or something else from the plant was locking up the alkaloids, preventing them from clumping up properly and holding them in suspension. I added more lye (totaling about 16g for the 900ml solution), tried vibrating (using an electric razor, as suguested here by some helpful fellow) and finally added a bit of salt. At least one of these was a factor in some good precipitation.


You will see that the precip is not falling to the bottom, which will make it difficult to separate from the basic water mix. Should I filter? What would folks recommend? I have tried fridging overnight, but that didn't seem to do the trick.

**EDIT** - I found that by removing just a portion of the liquid volume and replacing with regular tap that the crystals broke up to finer particles and sank to the bottom. Problem solved. I'll just check back once I have a final yeild.

 

[billydgator]

Has anyone had any success using Caapi leaves? What are the yields when using this tek on leaves in comparison to vines?
Ive read all 20 pages, the only post mentioning leaves resulted in nothing. I'm thinking many factors could have caused that tek to fail and haven't given up on the idea of using leaves yet.

 

[Binary Drool]

what is a good dose for the extract?

 

[dooby]

what is a good dose for the extract?

depends on route of administration...wiki for answers...

@billydgator: I believe that the leaves contain alks as well, I think they would contain more plant oils/fats as well...not sure if this would affect your extraction though, as I've no experience in this field yet...

 

[ZenSpice]

Well I am having great success at the moment using this tek on Rue. Once again the Nexus provides the keys to even more magical journeys, so thanks go out to Gibran2.

 

[Inner Paths]

I would also like to thank Gibran2 for this tek. Like ZenSpice, I did it on rue, though I only did the first two steps and pulled from the initial base. A tan powder was obtained (2 grams from 50 grams of whole rue seed) and it was so much easier than a manske, even if my product is way less pure (which I understand that Gibrans tek does clean up the product significantly more than where I stopped) but that is fine with me.

Cheers Gibran2!

 

[gibran2]

How very kind you both are.
Thanks!

:d

 

[Jees]

Bump

Why not manske a caapi extract product?

The story:
After boiling wood and getting that regular aya tea, instead of discarding the wood it can then be treated with more acid power to get some remaining stuff out.
(I beated that wood with HCL pH 1 - 2 for days)

Doing so, I get "a ton" of nice white precipitation making me smile by such a recover.
But it seems dull, it is not bitter at all, and it works shi.. for maoi.
Trying to manske it delivers quite nothing.
(Did I destroy potential goodies with too many acid???)
What the hell is this nice white precips, if it isn't bitter/maoi?

So I guess all goodies were already in the tea, and nothing much useful was to recover.

But this got me thinking, that the Easy Caapi Tec is also producing a lot of non useful precips. So why not including a manske step in the caapi tec's, just like in the rue tec's?

 

[gibran2]

Bump

Why not manske a caapi extract product?

The story:
After boiling wood and getting that regular aya tea, instead of discarding the wood it can then be treated with more acid power to get some remaining stuff out.
(I beated that wood with HCL pH 1 - 2 for days)

Doing so, I get "a ton" of nice white precipitation making me smile by such a recover.
But it seems dull, it is not bitter at all, and it works shi.. for maoi.
Trying to manske it delivers quite nothing.
(Did I destroy potential goodies with too many acid???)
What the hell is this nice white precips, if it isn't bitter/maoi?

So I guess all goodies were already in the tea, and nothing much useful was to recover.

But this got me thinking, that the Easy Caapi Tec is also producing a lot of non useful precips. So why not including a manske step in the caapi tec's, just like in the rue tec's?

A simple A/B of caapi removes all substances that are soluble in a basic solution and insoluble in an acidic solution.

Generally, caapi contains harmine, harmaline, and THH with only traces of other alkaloids if any. It is a much “cleaner” source material than, for example, Syrian rue.

Syrian rue contains, in addition to harmine, harmaline, and perhaps a trace of THH, vasicine and vasicinone. A Manske keeps the vasicine and vasicinone (and perhaps other alkaloids?) in solution.

If you added lots of HCl and then later basified, your precipitate might just be a chloride salt of the base you used (sodium, potassium, calcium, etc.) Was the precipitate soluble in water? Did it taste salty?

 

[Jees]

...Generally, caapi contains harmine, harmaline, and THH with only traces of other alkaloids if any. It is a much “cleaner” source material than, for example, Syrian rue...

Thx Gibran.
I was thinking of only traces of other stuff too, but it appeared to be bulk of it.

Only for hitting the wood (it was exhausted aya-brew wood) I went down pH 1 - 2 (overkill?) for recuperation of rest-alkaloids, but for cleaning further the precips (A/B'ing) I never really dive under 3, thats not too much acid for making loads of salt I think. I tend to switch acid (muriatic or phosforic) during the A/B's because I believe it to have an advantage.
For basing, NaOH and in end phase sodium carbonate for food safe result. I never go higher than 10 - 11 in basing, so no overkill here I suppose.

Because sticking to range of min3 - max11, I never expected to make such bulks of salt that it would not be soluble anymore. Ungrounded expectation?

When using NaCarb for basing. I make sure it is all dissolved nicely in a separate water pan, and stay under the limit where it would materialize when cooling off, like 100 gr/liter. That I use for basing.

The non-active precips come with both NaOH as with NaCarbonate. They taste like chalk (not salty) and are hardly-to-actually-not soluble in water or methanol. When I puch pH down to 1 only then they dissolve after a day or so, making the water nicely yellow-ish again.

I start to think that just like a/b-only extract of rue, also caapi extract with only-a/b hold a major amount of alkaloids(?) that are not harmaline/harmine/thh. This could explain why I need at least 500mg of caapi extract to get somewhere, and I know of others going 1.5 grams. I realize harmine is less powerful than harmaline, but still...

I believe this:

Generally, caapi contains harmine, harmaline, and THH with only traces of other alkaloids if any. It is a much “cleaner” source material than, for example, Syrian rue.

is a misconception that I believed also at first. But now having seen that wood gives a bulk of precips that are not active, I begin to regress.
Unless that this pH 1 hitting the wood did really turn useful actives into non-actives. In my wildest dream it's thh

No one did a manske of their caapi extract to narrow down on (harmaline +) harmine?

 

[LetSoulsDevour]

I´m in the middle of a caapi extraction but the alkaloids won´t precipitate..

What I have done:
Boil 50g of black caapi vine 5x30min with 25ml vineager the first 4 boils.

Reduce to 400ml.

Add 5g of NaOH to 50ml of water. Add this to brew and stir periodically for 5min.

No alkaloids precipitate whatsoever.. Have I done anything wrong? What do you suggest
I do?

Edit:

So I added 5g of NaOH to 50ml of water again and added this to the solution. No precipitation after 5 minutes. It is now in the fridge and if I don´t get anything
I´m guessing I have Alicia Anisopetala or a very weak caapi.. Luckily I have ordered
500g of white caapi from another vendor which should arrive tomorrow so will continue
brewing tomorrow. Failure is not an option, lol!

Edit2:

12+ more hours in the fridge, there is a mm of white stuff on the bottom. I siphon off the liquid and pour in 100ml of water and letting it settle for 1 hour. After an hour there is nothing at the bottom. I decide that it is not worth trying anymore and pour everything out. 1 hour later the mailman comes by with my white caapi vine. I am now in the middle of another try.

 

[LetSoulsDevour]

Hi again, I just tried the same method as above with 54g of white caapi vine. There is still no alkaloids crashing out when pouring in the liquid with NaOH.. Any ideas?

 

[Jees]

What is the pH after poring the NaOH in?
Was the wood bulk or shredded or powder?

 

[SnozzleBerry]

Would you mind posting pictures of the cross sections of both the "black" and "white" vines you are attempting to extract from?

I'm wondering if this could be due to mislabelling...

 

[LetSoulsDevour]

Thanks for your replies. After pouring in some more NaOH and stirring for a couple of minutes the alkaloids finally crashed out of the solution. They do not however want to sink to the bottom in 30 minutes though but are very slowly floating down.

Both the vines were shredded when I got them. I did not check the PH of the liquids. I do believe that the "black caapi" is mislabeled. There is a big difference in the black and white vines, the white seems a lot more fresh and have a distinct refreshing smell coming from it, while the black caapi seems to have no smell at all and feels "dead" in a way.
Also, the black caapi is much more "porous" than the white, which is more "woody".

Are there any solutions to get the alkaloids to sink to the bottom faster rather than waiting 24 hours?

 

[SnozzleBerry]

You can try stirring/agitating the alkaloids. Sometimes that will help convince them to settle. Seriously.

Alternatively...they don't have to settle. You can collect them in a coffee filter even if they haven't settled.

 

[LetSoulsDevour]

You can try stirring/agitating the alkaloids. Sometimes that will help convince them to settle. Seriously.

Alternatively...they don't have to settle. You can collect them in a coffee filter even if they haven't settled.

I will have to collect them in a coffee filter, I removed as much as liquid as possible but there is still 100ml of liquid even after 12+ hours in the fridge. Been using an electric razor for the first wash and the settling is noticeably faster but after a certain amount of settling it won´t settle anymore.

So the thing with coffe filter, I just pour it in and wait, how do I get the stuff out from the coffee filter and into new water without loosing anything?

Btw, after an overnight in the fridge, the liquid has turned from brown/black to a dark green, has this ever happened to anyone before?

 

[LetSoulsDevour]

This is really weird, when I filtered with a coffee filter the water turned out pretty clear but the alkaloids seem to have obtained the dark green colour. I put the alkaloids in a glass and poured in 50ml vinaeger, stirred and then diluted with water. The alkaloids doesnt seem to want to dissolve in the vinaeger. Instead it is settling at the bottom.. I Have no idea what I´ve done wrong, I have done this TEK before and it worked without any problems.

The pictures are ordered newest first. As you see the water is really greenish, the middle picture is when washing with plain water. And the last picture is is with vinaeger, the alkaloids seem to be grey and the water seem to be yellowish.

 

[Binary Drool]

looks kinda sketchy to me...

 

[Al-Wasi]

Im pretty confused after reading this multiple times and trying to understand what is happening during this process.

There is a whole lot of parts that say to siphon off the liquid and save it for later. I undestand at the part where the sediment is discarded that liquid is saved in order to base and obtain the harmlas from. However, are all the liquids earlier in the process saved as well and then combined with the final liquids near the end of the tek?