How To Make Salvia Divinorum Extract

[Synchronium]

[Used with permission from The Coffeesh0p - Original article: How To Make Salvia Divinorum Extract]

How To Make Salvia Divinorum Extract

Tue 5th September, 2006 by John Clarke


Introduction

Have you ever tried making your own crude Salvia Divinorum extract at home, and wondered why it looks like a black sticky mess that smokes harsher than a porcupine eating competition? Well, fear not, for this guide will ensure a quality finished product rivalling that of store-bought extracts.

This extract will make approximately 10g of unstandardised 10x extract. Provided you can use a calculator, the quantities detailed below can be jiggled around to make any strength extract you want.

 
Equipment

100g Salvia Divinorum Leaf
    The same Salvia Divinorum Leaf we sell @ The Coffeesh0p.
1x Large Saucepan
    Just a regular large saucepan. Make sure it's clean. No one wants to find the remains of burnt on spaghetti in their pipe.
1x Pyrex Tray
    A large, wide, glass dish essentially. You might find a casserole dish fits the bill.
1x Small Glass Container
    Anything will do, even a jam jar.
1x Tall, Narrow Glass Container
    The perfect tool for the job is a boiling tube, but anything remotley similar will do.
1x Pipette
    Not everyone has access to calibrated volumetric pipettes so anything that looks like an eye dropepr will do. That means, a thin tube with a rubber bit on the end which you can squeeze.
2lt Propane Based Solvent
    No not propane, but either propan-2-ol (AKA Isopropanol, Isopropyl Alcohol, Rubbing Alcohol) or propanone (AKA Acetone). They need to be 99% pure at least. Don't even think about using nail varnish remover.
300ml Naphtha
    The best source of commercially available naphtha in the UK is lighter fluid.

 
Step 1 - Powder Your Leaf

The first thing to do is weigh out your 100g of Salvia Divinorum Leaf. Remove 10g of the best leaves from your stash and set them aside for later. The remaining 90g needs to be powdered using your trusty coffee grinder. It's high RPM motor and stainless steel blades are no match for your dried salvia leaf. It's worth pointing out that although the leaves may not instantly grind, you'll have to give them a few minutes, but they WILL powder eventually. Use the grinder in 1 minute bursts, allowing the motor to cool in between. When you remove the lid from the grinder, unless you want to look like Shrek, do it in a fume cupboard. The coffee grinder will reduce the leaf to a flour like consistency which will billow out as soon as you remove the lid, turning everything in the immediate vicinity a sexy shade of green.

 
Step 2 - Extract The Salvinorin-A

Now you have 90g of powdered leaf, get it in your saucepan and pour in enough solvent to comfortably cover your leaf. Stir it constantly for 5 minutes and then let it sit for 8 hours or so. After that time, enough of the salvinorin should have dissolved in your solvent, so you can now carefully pour off the liquid in your saucepan into your Pyrex tray, being careful enough to leave all the solids behind.

If you'd like to make sure you extract as much salvinorin-a as possible, you may repeat this step once more.

 
Step 3 - The Waiting Game

As simple as it sounds, you have about 16 hours in which to twiddle your thumbs, watch some paint dry, or whatever you feel like. During this time, don't even think about touching your extraction, and make sure it's in a dark place. Light has a nasty habit of destroying salvinorin-a in solution. The purpose of this step is to let any sediment such as tannins fall out of the leaf which are hard to extract later on.

After the 16 or so hours are up, you may pour off the remaining liquid into the original saucepan, provided you emptied out the powdered leaf earlier.

 
Step 4 - Evaporating The Solvent

This takes forever, is incredibly boring and will give you terrible stomach ache if you don't do it somewhere well ventilated. The best, safest and longest method of evaporating the solvent is in the dark, in the absence of heat. Remember, the solvent is flammable, so applying heat to it should be avoided. Blowing air across the solvent will speed things up substantially, so if you have a fan, use it, but again, only somewhere well ventilated. If the fan produces a spark, it could ignite the vapour, blowing up both you and your extraction.

When the evaporation is complete, you should be left with a load of black gunk on the inside of your container. This is as far as most people get with their extractions and is the reason why the end result is a black sticky mess. That's ok for about 5x or 6x extracts, but any stronger than that and it becomes unsmokable.

 
Step 5 - Purification

When your black gunk is completely dry, you can scrape it out of your container and place it into a tall, narrow container. To this, add 50ml or so of naphtha. The naphtha dissolves the green/black waxes but leaves behind the salvinorin-a. After you add the first lot of naphtha, allow the container 30 minutes or so to settle, then pipette off two thirds of the naphtha and discard it. Repeat this process at LEAST 5 more times until your salvinorin-a is no longer a black colour. If you keep washing with naphtha, it will eventually turn white, however that kind of purity isn't necessary for making 10x extract. If you were making something like 40x or 60x (not recommended), then the higher the purity, the better.

After the last naphtha wash, remove two thirds one last time and this time, allow the naphtha to evaporate off, leaving you with relatively pure salvinorin-a. DO NOT try and smoke/ingest this, as even a tenth of a milligram can be too much for some people.

 
Step 6 - Fortification

Now we have the salvinorin-a from 90g of leaf, we shall add it back to the 10g of quality leaf you set aside in Step 1. Although not completely accurate, you can see this is why it's called 10x extract, as there's 10x the amount of salvinorin-a in the finished product.

To do this, we place the salvinorin-a we produced in the previous step into the saucepan and add to it the same amount of solvent we used in step 1. Stir it round for a few minutes to ensure it has all dissolved. Next, add the 10g of leaf to your small container and pour the contents of the saucepan over it.

You can now evaporate off all of this solvent with a hairdryer, or gentle heat, such as a water bath, until all of the solvent has evaporated.

The finished product is approximately 10g of leaf, looking a little darker than normal, 10 times as strong.

[Dominaduro]

OMG, I didn't realize this until now, but it was this very article that first got me started with extracting! It's very well written, understandable, and effective. Thanks for the write-up and post it here, I'm sure it will help many other people.

Expertise++

Dominaduro

[Synchronium]

OMG, I didn't realize this until now, but it was this very article that first got me started with extracting! It's very well written, understandable, and effective. Thanks for the write-up and post it here, I'm sure it will help many other people.

Expertise++

Dominaduro

That's the kind of comment that makes my job worthwhile. Thanks!

[bodyguard14]

Yeah great job on the step-by-step instructions. Is there by any chance and easier way to make it? And i sure don't have 100grams of that stuff

[Arcygenical]

Yeah great job on the step-by-step instructions. Is there by any chance and easier way to make it? And i sure don't have 100grams of that stuff

Not really... If you're doing a really small extraction though, all you need is acetone...

Put the desired leaf you wish to extract from (let's say, 27g) in a glass/metal dish, and set aside 1g.

Pour 100ml of acetone over the 27g of leaf. (100ml is good enough to extract from up to 40g of leaf)

Let it sit for 10m.

Strain off the liquid, through a coffee filter or something and save it.

Let it evaporate down to about 20ml

Add in your 1g of leaf, and let the rest of the acetone evaporate...

You've got 1g of 28x leaf (or about 25x standardized).

[TheDude]

Not really... If you're doing a really small extraction though, all you need is acetone...

Thanks a lot for this method - it looks more likely to get done than the Pro method given originally.

Is acetone same as lighter fluid - would the Zippo lighter fluid work ? 

Why such drastic difference between the 2 methods ? Like no heating required, etc.

Is this stuff stronger than the 10x made earlier - as I don't want the top 3 levels of user experience 

[Arcygenical]

Acetone, and lighter fluid (naphtha) are two TOTALLY different chemicals.

Acetone extracts EVERYTHING from the salvia leaf... Chlorophyls, tannins, and of course, the molecules in question: Salvinorins.

Naphtha will dissolve most chlorophyls and tannins, but NOT Salvinorin A... Therefore, it becomes useful in a totally different way.

Basically, you extract with acetone, let it dry to a goopy, waxy, mush, then "wash" it with naphtha over and over again. The naphtha dissolves the waxes and tars in the resin product, but leaves the Salvinorin A behind. With enough cleaning, you eventually get pure Salvinorin A, B, and C (and so on).

With really small extractions, IE: those under 20x potency, and in the area of a few grams tops... You don't actually accumulate enough waxes from the start material to benefit from a cleaning with naphtha... So you can extract it with acetone, then deposit it right back onto your end product leaf, without getting the end product too sticky. Large batches (working with a kilogram or so of parent leaf) or batches where you're going above 20x tend to get really sticky... And a sticky extract is hard to smoke.


I just say don't heat the acetone, because when working with 100ml or so (4oz) of acetone, it'll evaporate down in about an afternoon. When I do my kilogram extractions, when I have 4L of acetone, I need to heat it to get it to all evaporate! But when you're making a gram of 10x or so... You barely need a fan blowing across it.




If you want to make 2g of 10x extract... Put 20g of leaf in a bowl, cover with 2 shots of acetone, swirl it around and let it sit for 10m or so.

Strain off the acetone through a coffee filter, and let it evaporate down to about half a shot of liquid... Make sure you dissolve the green "rings" that form around the acetone when it evaporates, as these rings contain lots of the active chemical (just drop some acetone down the sides of your extracting container with a glass eyedropper) and when you're left with a tablespoon of liquid or so, add in 2g of leaf. Let it soak up the liquid, and dry completely. Bam 2g of 10x. Have fun!

[U_Wrang]

I'd be curious if anyone has compared results using Isopropyl Alcohol vs. Acetone as an initial solvent, and if anyone has tried or can comment on using lab-type refluxing techniques.

[Arcygenical]

Acetone and Isopropryl shouldn't be much different... I'd expect the alcohol extraction to be much gummier as you require a much larger volume of it, leading to more waxes being extracted.

[Gorlax]

I used IPA and it worked great I had little waxes and was left with pretty pure looking crystals.

[SalvinorinLighter]

Wait, I'm a bit confused. 10x means 100g? or 10g? 1x means 1g? or 10g?

[JustAnotherRegularGuy]

It can be either. The "x" is the multiplier. If you extract 10g of leaves and put it into 1g of final product it would be 10x. Same goes for if you extract 100g of leaf and put it into 10g of final product. Still 10x.

JARG

[SalvinorinLighter]

So possibly it's why people pay a lot more for the 'Purple Sticky Salvia 20-80X.' You're getting 200-800g worth of leaf?

[JustAnotherRegularGuy]

If it comes in 10g packets yes. I thought it came in 1g packets which would only be 20g to 80g of original leaf. But if it comes in 10g packets then it would be 200g to 800g of original leaf.

JARG

[black8teen]

I think that the "purple sticky" shit comes in 5g containers. I bought some and unfortunately it was my first experience with salvia. I don't know if I got a bogus batch or something but the most I think that was gotten out of it after someone smoked 1 gram of "20x" and they felt light headed. Then they smoked a second gram and felt relaxed. It did not work.

Here is a question:
    Say you have 1g of 50x salvia. Hypothetically could you split that into 5 equal sections of .2g (equivalent of 1g of 10x) and mix it with .8g of regular concentration, and make a mixture that is equal to 1g of 5x extract? I believe my math is okay but I am just wondering how well diluting a strong concentration would work.