What's up with my changa?

[VoidBeast]

I made my first changa blend recently, but I'm not sure it turned out right. I used 1 g spice, 1 g herb base, and 10x caapi menstrum, with lavender infused IPA as my solvent. My herbs were a mix of blue lotus, Spanish lavender buds from my garden and some mountain sagebrush I had wild harvested, with just a tiny amount of bobinsana added (not enough for the scale to detect, just wanted a bit of effect). When I first melted the spice with the menstrum and IPA, I misjudged and poured it over my herbs before the spice had fully dissolved, and ended up with some large crystals left behind, so I had to add a little more IPA and repeat. Because of this, I had a bit higher solvent to herb ratio than was probably ideal at first, but everything dried pretty quickly under a fan. The problem was there was a LOT of dark brown residue left behind in the bowl. I had read that it was okay to redissolve any residue in some IPA and add to the herbs again, so I did this, but I had to use quite a bit of IPA because there was so much to dissolve, so it basically turned into a second soaking rather than just dribbling a bit over the herbs.

After drying a second time, there was STILL residue left behind, only somewhat less than before and not as dark. I repeated the process, only this time letting it evaporate more in the bowl before adding the herbs. The residue was much less than before and more of an orange color now. I was able to scrape up a lot of it with the herbs once everything dried, but when I weighed my changa it only was 2.2 g instead of the expected 3 g. Do I need to keep at this residue until I get all of it? Is it possible that my herbs have reached a point of saturation and don't want to take anymore in? At this point the changa is really dark and brittle, not "herb" texture at all. I realized I didn't put in anything particularly "fluffy" in my blend like mullein, though I do have some on hand I didn't feel particularly drawn to using it so I hadn't. Could there be another explanation for how off the weight is, other than the residue remaining in the bowl? What should I do?

 

[VoidBeast]

No ideas as to why my changa weighs so little? I'm pretty sure it's not the residue left in the bowl. At this point it doesn't look like there could be anywhere near .8 g left behind, it's really very slight, and looking at pics of other peoples' changa after drying I see more residue in many of them than I do in my bowl currently. I wouldn't be concerned if it was only a slight weight variation, but to be missing almost a gram of weight seems like a lot. If anyone could chime in, I would appreciate it, since this is going to be my first experience with anything DMT related and if something is way off I'd like to know before I try smoking it and have a bad experience or something... or psych myself into thinking there's something wrong with the changa and have a bad experience for that reason.

 

[Sakkadelic]

So you used 1g of that 10x caapi menstruum?
Since it is a menstruum then it must have some liquid in it, water i suppose, so when the changa dried that liquid evaporated and that's the missing mass.

 

[Lumina]

Have you tried it yet?

As Sakka already posted, doing a menstruum is nowhere as accurate as doing an extraction, so you’ll never know how much crude you’ll be left with post evaporation.. unless the actives % is known prior to making the menstruum, then you would at least know what to expect more or less but it would still be far from precise efficiency wise.

Although if that .2 that’s been added to your 1:1 is actually full spectrum Caapi spirits, that should be enough harmalas to power up the blend.

 

[VoidBeast]

Sakkadelic & Lumina - I might've been confused about the procedure. I didn't weigh the liquid menstruum beforehand; I just thought if I soaked the 10g of caapi in alcohol for 30+ days, and then evaporated it down and added it to 1g of herbs and 1g spice, that once it dried the remaining harmalas were supposed to add another 1g of weight if things had gone ideally. But I might've confused two different things, and things probably didn't go ideally and perhaps not many alkaloids ended up in the menstruum, as suggested. As long as "enough" ended up in it, I'll be happy with the first attempt. Is it possible that no alkaloids ended up in the menstruum, though? I know it's not a precise method, but can you end up with nothing?

To answer Lumina's question, I haven't tried it yet since I've had family in town and it hasn't been ideal, but I'm planning on trying it next week. Since I have never tried freebase DMT or Changa before, how will I judge if I successfully achieved a harmala effect? If I take a toke, and feel like nothing happens, how long do I wait before I figure I need more vs. it's the harmalas prolonging the launch period and just wait? I read about an unpleasant experience based on misjudging this, so yeah... I would prefer to avoid that kind of thing for a first time. If I ended up with more of an enhanced leaf than a changa, that's okay, since I really have no way of knowing what I prefer at this time. I just don't want to misjudge it.