Now, I'm not an expert. I read a few of LSDuck666's posts about his extractions, and wanted to replicate them. I failed twice. I then turned to the forbidden resource (AI) for helping me understand the variables at play and why my extractions didn't work well. When I say didn't work well, I ended up with gloopy snot that was too thick to filter. It did dry into a dark powder and is psychoactive, but it's nowhere near as pretty as LSDuck666's crystals.

So, with the help of AI, I dug into what's going on behind the scenes and what I did wrong. First let's understand what cactus is made up of. Assuming you've got a dry powder with no water, what you've got is a few percentage points of alkaloids (mescaline, hordenine, others), a lot of polysaccharides (plant sugars) and some fibrous material (the stuff you can actually filter out).

The first thing to understand is why you get a gloopy mess in the first place. This happens because heat and acidity over time break down polysaccharides (a kind of plant sugar) into starch, and this starch makes the water thick. You can't filter polysaccharides out once they break down. This is what will make your mixes too thick to filter - the dissolved polysaccharides.

Now, if you heat up this gloopy mess, it will get thinner and easier to filter. So that helps. But the best thing is to not end up with a gloopy mess in the first place. How do we do that? What levers do we have?

It turns out that one big lever is not too much acidity and not for too long. You see, I read LSDuck's recipe. He calls for like one teaspoon of vinegar. I was like, no way that's enough, and basically free handed it. Added a few tablespoons at least to less than a quart of water. Now, vinegar is useful, because alkaloids are more soluble in an acidic solution, but the downside is that this breaks down polysaccharides too. The key then is to limit vinegar exposure - use less of it, and it's going to be better to do multiple shorter pulls than one long 24 hour pull. The more time the plant matter is sitting in the vinegar solution, the more the polysaccharides break down, and the more gloopy it becomes. You could even do your first pull with no acidity at all - apparently alkaloids are soluble in water, they just aren't very soluble in water. So, you will need vinegar for complete extraction, but you can minimize it to minimize gloopiness.

The other thing you can do, after extracting it, is to use alcohol to precipitate the dissolved polysaccharides out of solution. Now I haven't tested this myself, but apparently if you add 95% alcohol (remember to use food grade please) to your solution to get the alcohol concentration to at least 60%, you can precipitate a lot of (but not all of) the dissolved polysaccharides out of the alcohol. So, you can then filter this, the polysaccharides stay behind and what you're left with is a water-alcohol solution with less polysaccharides which you can then dry.

I hope this helps. Again, I'm not the expert but I hope this can demystify the process for some of us and help us to develop better teks. Yes, you can use cielo, I know, but I'm too scared to use those chemicals (and my wife would kill me). So I'll stick to basic extractions, and try to get those as good as possible.

I really don't see why anyone would make a tea anymore. You can end up with a much more concentrated dry powder that is pretty easy to capsule. Even with my recent attempt which really wasn't great, I was able to make capsules from it, two of which I could feel something from (raw material was not great).

Looking for some songs about the sacred plants!

Lot of this stuff may be bogus or #dangerous as far as I know. I don’t know anything about these other plants, just came across this today

Did ceilo with 100g of cactus powder I did use citric acid was warned against it thought it would be fine though unfortunately learned the hard way💔 this is after 2 hours on the mag stirrer is it recoverable? If so how would I do so? This is my first extraction so please bear with me thanks in advance

I just got 6.2% fumerate off a CIELO of 200g dry PC. I'm reporting this because obviously, this is really really high and I am concerned something skewed the yield.

I used a 4 foot tall, 5" wide PC tip cut that I harvested in November. It was cut from my friend's ten year old Socal stand that gets full sun, no fertilizer, no watering other than rain.

I let it sit outside in the full sun for 5 months. Then I put it in my non-weather-insulated shed which is fully dark for 3 months. It rooted all over the stalk and grew out white with etoliation.

For prep I took mostly only the green flesh and left the white core. I harvested whatever had a green tint which brought me only about 3/4" below the surface max.

I did a regular 5 round CIELO following the nexus calculator exactly and my first pull was super dark green on the strip. Round 5 was still pretty green but I was not really believing what I saw so I stopped and discarded the pulp.

The EA was not fresh. It's been reused a few times and I noticed that it was cloudy so I filtered it through a paper towel and then two coffee filters. After I salted and collected the fumerate, I noticed that the acidified EA had clouds of cellulose looking material in it.

The yield looks, tastes and smells like it should but is it possible that the powder is contaminated with cactus material that wasn't filtered out? Obviously, whatever is cloudy in the acidified EA was fine enough to pass through multiple filtering steps but maybe some was left behind and bonded to the salted yield. If this is the case, how can I separate it?

This is my second run with this stand. My first run with a similar cutting of 200g dry yielded 3.2%. There was more white flesh in that as I tried to dry everything but the core.

I have two more aged cuttings and am picking up some fresh EA to try with that. My other runs have been pretty normal. Prior PC run with a different plant processing everything but the core yielded 0.8% after being aged 4 months. A random bridgesii yielded 2.5%.