Urushibara is right. Psilocybin extraction can be done a lot easier. The shortest write-up I have seen so far for it is to slice 25 grams of freshly harvested cubensis mushrooms, put them in a milkpan along with 100ml of fruit juice. Ad a crushed tablet of vitamin C against blueing.
Heat until it boils, then remove pan from heat source. Add more vitC. Store overnight in fridge at about 4 centigrade.
Then pour the liquid through the pulp (placed in an empty teabag) via a funnel into a 250ml soft drink bottle. Put the pulp back in the pan, add 150ml of fruit juice&swirl, then filter/add this to the content of the bottle. Drink on empty stomach.
The problem of this approach is that the mushrooms need to be grown in a similar style (in the example the pf tek was used), at a similar temperature and harvested in the same growth stadium. Only then 100ml of this liquid is always of nearly the same potency (comparable to 10g of fresh mushrooms or max. 10mg of psilocybin).
Psilocybin crystallization enters the picture if one wants a standarized consumption, but the potency of the starting material is unknown. Having 100mg of pure psilocybin to dump into a liter of juice is the solution.
I am not completely persuaded by the described soxhlet method. A soxhlet is nice to have by hand but is expensive to buy. And the crystals may not be pure because the mushrooms contain many more materials. It works pretty well because the psilocybin is so much less soluble in alcohol than the rest of the gunk (I am still thankful for the little hint in this thread), but psilocybin is very well soluble in the liquid component which gives mushrooms their odor. And that component will always collect in the primary alcohol extract.
A route to pure psilocybin is to extract&filter the mushrooms powder in 140 proof or 70 percent alcohol, evaporate to 1/10 of the volume, remove undesired components with pet ether (twice) acetone (twice) and 95 percent alcohol (cold) and then extract the remaining dark stuff in 95 percent ethanol (boiling), filter out the dark granules and cool the ethanol until white crystals form. Perhaps it can be simplefied (see for instance
http://www.fanaticus.com/mycoalki.htm
) but I rather remove the amber colored undesired stuff than let them contaminate the crystals. Another problem I see with the super-simple pf 'magic liquor' technique is that, if a soxhlet is not used, the mushroom powder needs to be extracted in boiling 190 proof ethanol. Suppose that you have 100 grams of dried mushrooms or so. That needs a lot of 190 proof alcohol for extraction - and all of that needs to boil because otherwise the psilocybin refuses to dissolve in it. Nah, then I would prefer using 140 proof ethanol. In that, the mushrooms can be extracted at low temperatures (and I have a gutfeeling that cold extractions are always better, especially with fragile compounds like these). In the fridge even. But 140 proof can not be used for immediate crystallization. Hence the evap down, subsequent cleaning up with nonpolar solvent and acetone and recrystallization in a few ml of 190 proof ethanol.
OK. For a successfull biosynthesis of 1+ gram of psilocybin, my best guess for the ingrediënts is:
- 200 half pint jars (hole in the lid filled with cottonwool), each containing 100ml of medium.
medium recipe:
1.2 Kg maltose, 100g British Marmite, 20,000ml of water. Boil until everything dissolves. Fill all jars&sterilize.
Inoculate each jar with a bit of mycelium which grows on something which floats (pinch of sawdust). Wait 3 weeks.
Pour contents of the jars through sieve. Harvest 4000-5000 grams of fresh mycelium. Cold desiccate to less than 500g dry material. Extract two times, each with 750ml of alcohol, evap down to 150ml, use 100ml of naphta and somewhat more of acetone to clean it up, boil the residue in 300ml of 95 proof ethanol (denatured is fine) and yield 1+ gram of psilocybin.
This is a slight modification of American patent 3183172 and 3192111. But... WHOA!
That is a lot of ingredients and solvents! Cause: Hofmann's mycelium was just 0.2 percent strong. I bet the mycelium was harvested prior to pinning.
With a pf tek setup I guess you need 120 grams of dried unopened carpophores (the harvest of 2 full spore syringes, used for 20 jars). Plus some three quarters of a Kg of brown rice and about 1/10 as much of all named solvents compared to Hofmann's approach.
But OTOH - the Hofmann approach is alot more simple if only the mycelium would be of a higher potency. Waiting until the mycelium pins is one option, another is to use something else than cubensis mycelium. How about mycelium of Psilocybe azurescens or Panaeolus cyanescens for this? I have read somewhere that these mycelia are of 2/3 the potency of Psilocybe semilanceata mushrooms.
How interesting! I hope the Hive doesn't mind I have shared my brainstorm session of today!
