So I decided to remake this page and change it more into a tek after having received some requests for details of the tek I used. 

****EDIT:It has been brought to my attention that the reason my spice is yellow, is because I do the basidification and naptha wash when the extract is still boiling hot. I was under the impression, that this would be better than using cold extract and hot naptha. I'm going to test this myself so stay tuned for updates.****

Before I start, I want to make clear that this is not my tek. We found it on tribes.net and later found out it originated on mycotopia.net where its refered to as Marsofolds tek 

For starters, lets discuss all materials I've used and check if they are really required. This tek is for extracting 250 grams of rootbark which is the amount I prefer to do extractions with.

Checklist

1. 250 grams of finely powdered Mimosa Hostilis rootbark
2. Distilled water (tap water may be used and some people claim it doesnt make a difference)
3. White vinegar 
   
4. Natrium Hydroxide aka lye. Basically the stuff you use for cleaning your plumbing. Look for something with at least 99% natrium hydroxide. Available in most dutch supermarkets and drugstores
5. Naptha - I used Zippo lighterfluid
6. Crockpot - they are around 50 euro's in Holand. You dont need one but since I have one, I can't imagine doing extractions without it. The big advantage is that you can put stuff in, switch it on and just forget about it for hours. Normal pan should work, just make sure it never starts to really boil
7. Digital PH meter - Optional, you should be able to do without but I like to keep a close eye on numbers :)
8. Old T-shirt or better, cheese cloth for straining your rootbark
9. Pyrex baking dish - or another oven dish, preferably glass. Pyrex is good because its strong. Available in many householdstores
10. 2 500ml Erlenmeyer flask -  They are just very convenient but you can use any glass container.
11. A turkeybaster or a syringe - Or anything that enables you to seperate one fluid layer from another. A 50ml syringe works great to get the last drops of naptha out.
    

Step 1

This step we will extract the alkaloids from the rootbark by heating it in a water vinegar solution. To assure maximum yield, three extractions are done with fresh water/vinegar used each time.  

The powdered rootbark is put in the crockpot.

 One literof the premixed water/vinegar solution is added:

 Stir well

Until no more klumps can be seen

 Close the crockpot and let it on for 2 hours (some people say 4 but I didnt experience any difference in yield personally)

 After two hours, switch off the crockpot and pour everything in a glass container like a wine jug. I lost the picture I made with the liquid in but I used this one:

 First extraction, I learned its best to let it sit overnight so all bark particles can sink to the bottom. Next day, you can pour off the clear liquid and strain the remaining bark through cheesecloth or a tshirt. If you want, you could strain right away but in my experience this makes it very messy to work with. The second and third extractions settle within an hour and are easier to strain. Repeat this process two times each time with a fresh liter of water/vinegar mix. After the last extraction, squeeze everything you can out of the remaining rootbark to make sure you catch all the liquid and combine the 3 liters you extracted in a big souppan.

Three liters of liquid is a burden to work with and at this stage, its easy to decrease the amount of liquid to a more workable amount. A little word of caution: I'm no chemist but I do know that 100ML of naptha can hold 1 gram of elf spice. I am assumiing that the same or about the same is true for water. In ohter words, 100ml of water can hold a maximum of 1 gram of spice. Average potency is reported to be around 0.57% but the material I used here, was a little over 1%. My point is, I guess with my amateur mind, that you dont want to end up with to little water compared to how much spice it can hold. If I make sense at all :)

 IAnyway, in this particular case, 400ML water should be quite safe since I'm not expecting much over 2 grams. Very slowly, over an hour, I boiled down the extraction to 400m

 Note that the volume here is incorret. It should read 400ml but these are old pictures. I will replace them in a week or two. These pictures are actually from an earlier extraction when I was still experimenting and all *(which I'm still doing)

 Step two - basidification

Like I said before, I am no chemist period. So when I'm going to describe what the next step does, its probably wrong in a sense that I have the jargon wrong. Anyway, our goodies are now in the 400ml water. We have to convert them to a smokable form. We do this, by changing the PH value of the extraction, to a value of 13. If you don't have a PH meter, you should continue adding untill the solution is a dark black. And then a little more. Overbasidification is no problem. Underbasidification however, is.

So for this tek I heat up 100ml of water, I put this in a pyrex container. I then slowly add natrium hydroxide to it, SLOWLY because it reacts strongly. I keep adding untill pieces remain on the bottom of the container. In other words,  the water is saturated by the lye. This solution is added to the 400ml of extract untill a PH13 is reached.

 So eventually we end up with about 500ml of liquid:

 Notice how there is enough room in the top of the container to add naptha. The reason I like to work with these volumes, is that 100ml naptha fits perfectly on top of this. Because it ends up in the smaller part of the flask, its much easier to suck up afterwards. Anyway, we are going to do three naptha washes. 

 Heat up 100ml of naptha.  I just put it in an erlenmeyer flask and fill my sink with boiling hot water. I leave the flask in there some time. If your initial solution is still hot from boiliing it down, thats only good since it will heat up the naptha even more. Warm naptha can hold spice much better than cold naptha.

 Heating it up:

Once its heated up, add the naptha to the erlenmeyerflask, fill it to the top.

 Next step is to very thouroughly, mix the naptha with your extraction. I do this by pouring the contents of the flask, in another flask and back. And repeat this about 15 times. In no case, speparate layers should be seen now. When mixed accordingly, leave the flask for sometime. You can watch the naptha rising to the top and see little volcano's of spice emerging. I found this quite nice to look at:

 First picture is a few minutes after letting the flask settle:

  Second picture is after about half an hours, just before I suck off the naptha:

 Following three pictures show the flask in 10 minute time periods. Notice how the two layers seperate:

Once your layers are seperated, use a device like a syringe or turkeybaster to suck off the top layer. Try to avoid sucking up no other liquid. Put the naptha in your baking dish. Repeat this process two times. The third time, the top naptha layer should be clear, indicating you got all or most of the goodies out. If the layer is not clear but still cloudy, you seem to have more spice in and its adviced to extend this process as many times untill the naptha is clear. I've never had (in the fout times I did this), to do it more than three times however.

 Put your baking dish with the naptha in a plastic bag to avoid water entering the mix. Put this in the freezer for about 24 hours.

 After a short time, you will already see the spice precepitate in the dish:

After 24 or more hours (some say 4 days to be sure), pour off the naptha in a container, you can save this for later extractions and also keep it for now untill you are sure, your extraction was succesfull. Let the remaining naptha evaporate. I created a cardboard box with two pc fans that constantly blow over it. This will evap everything within a few hours. 

 When completely dry, use a blade as below, to collect your goodies. Depening on how clean it is, you can purify it more. If you result is honeyish in appearance and feeling, you probably sucked off some of the basidified liquid. 

 ITo clean your spice easy, heat up enough naptha to hold your spice (100ml per gram). Dissolve the spice back in the naptha. Shake the flask with this solution very hard for some time and you will notice that orange goo will collect on the bottom off the flask and will stick there. Pour off the naptha in your baking dish, put back in the freezer and after one or two days, pour off and let evap.

Cleaning your spice 

3 grams of spice extracted from Mexican strain Mimosa was not entirely clean.  

 I added the spice to 300ml of Naptha (use 100ml per gram of spice)

I put a pot with water on the stove, heated it up and held the flask in the water, careful as of not touching the bottom of the pot. During this time, I shook the flask agressively, heated it up more, shook some more etc..

 Notice some goo collecting on the bottom of the flask. We want to get rid of this goo so keep shaking and heating untill most of the goo is in one place.

Then I pour of the naptha being carefull not to include any of the goo. I saved the goo to check later if more magic is in there. Below the flask. you see the cleaner naptha. I put this back in the freezer for 14 hours.

*** UPDATE So this has this very specific spice smell. I used some clean naptha and put it back in the flash with the goo. I then heated it up and shook it well. I hoped to get more spice out of it while leaving the goo in there. Eventually, I poured of the naptha, put in the freeze and next day poured of and eveped. The result was a very gooey drop of spice which I threw away. 

After 14 hours, here's the result.

Collecting

Endresult: