How To Make Your Own High Quality Salvia Divinorum Extract

by John Clarke - Uploaded on October 8, 2009 

 

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. It's worth noting that we at The Coffeesh0p use a method derived from the following guide. Although, we use a few extra steps and more precise laboratory equipment and glassware to make sure our salvia extract is 100% awesome, you can achieve an extract of reasonable quality too from the comfort of your own bedroom!

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

• 1x Coffee Grinder - A small handheld coffee grinder, used to powder coffee beans.
  
• 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.
  
• 1x Hair Dryer - Y'know... Those things you use to dry your hair?
  
• 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 varnesh remover.
  
• 300ml Naphtha. The best source of commerically available naphtha in the UK is lighter fluid.

Step 1 - Powder Your Leaf

The first thing to do is weigh out your 100g of 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. Take your hairdryer and blow on the solvent until there's hardly any left. It will go from a dark green colour to almost black. When there's 100ml or so left, transfer it to your small glass container, where you can either continue to evaporate the solvent with a hairdryer or place it in an oven no higher than 50-60*C. If you have a gas oven, DO NOT DO THIS. If I get any angry phone calls because you blew your house up, expect a personal visit from me to slap you round your charred face for being an idiot.

You should now 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.

Aafter 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 meat kind of precision balances required to measure that amount.

 

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.

 

 

 

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