How to Extract Plant Alkaloids?
Friday, November 20th, 2009 at
10:19 pm
I am taking organic chemistry and I was wondering what is the best way to extract alkaloids from plants such as yohimbe, ephedra, coffee beans, passion flowers and others as well. Any help would be great.
So far I just put powdered coffee beans into Isopropanol and shook it vigorously, but I’m not sure what to do next.
Would I be able to use water+vinegar for the acidified water? Also is there anything else to use besides lye, because I don’t feel safe using that.
Tagged with: alkaloids • Coffee Beans • isopropanol • lye • organic chemistry • passion flowers • plants • vinegar • yohimbe
Filed under: Organic Coffee Beans
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what exactly are you up to ? trying to make your own energy drink? If so, this is a dangerous thing. too much of these chemicals can kill you. And if you don’t know what your doing you could injure yourself in the extraction process.
that said, follow the instructions here
http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/dmt/dmt_chemistry1.shtml
**** update ****
you didn’t read the link did you? You added ground up coffee beans to a polar solvent. That won’t work. the alkaloids are in non polar forms.
follow these steps…
add nonpolar solvent. Shake well
1) grind up material
2) add acidified water
3) let it sit
4) seperate the solids from the liquid via a coffee filter
5) repeat if you want
6) add basified water (NaOH + water) to pH 11 or so
7) cool
9) seperate the layers. the alkaloid is in the non polar layer
10) repeat steps 8 and 9 if you want better yield
11) evaporate the non polar solvent
12) the residue is your alkaloids.
*** update 2 ***
vinegar is 5% acetic acid + flavorings. acetic acid is a weak acid and the flavorings will be difficult to remove later. It would probably work but I would suspect your yield will be low.
both muriatic acid (hydrochloric acid) and sodium or potassium hydroxide should available in pure form at either a pool supply house or a store that sells water treatment chemicals.
Alkaloids are more water soluble in acid so ethanol or isopropanol acidified with HCl should do the job
Use ethanol.