• Psychedelic Drugs Welcome Guest
    View threads about
    Posting RulesBluelight Rules
    PD's Best Threads Index
    Social ThreadSupport Bluelight
    Psychedelic Beginner's FAQ

Extracting psilocybin from mushrooms without ethyl alcohol?

@ Solipsis -----> U r the Man bro, and I appreciate all your advice.

I was simply letting the OP know if you are a beginner and want to make some sort of a mushroom extract a simple 151 proof alcohol is the easiest, safest best first step In my opinion. I feel a mask and eye protection along with proper ventilation is a necessity if working with Methanol or IPA, plus evaporation precaution. I definitely wasn't insulting your opinion and appreciate the clarification on salts.
 
No problem, I didn't take it that way. And yes if you don't want to get complicated, using plain alcohol in the form of highest % spirits available is definitely the way to go.

I was wondering about all this and about mushrooms that I might have extra of to experiment with that I want to turn into a crystalline product in the best possible way... but this kind of thing always irks me: if you do an acid/base extraction with something like 4-HO tryptamines (the goal being to clean it up and create some kind of salt) and your polar phase is water based, then that mix seems like a no-no because it often yields black goo and you need to evaporate the water at some point.

So what about adding a few drops of concentrated sulfuric acid during an alcoholic extraction - after filtration to be precise (I will probably try to get methanol, which isn't so hard to acquire) ? Is that asking for oxidation or will the right amount yield sulphates than can be crystallized ?
Do you then crystallize by making a saturated boiling solution that you gently cool all the way to -20 (Then evaporating the methanol to recover the rest as powder) ?
 
Oh yes, I meant mostly that I would not use aqueous sulfuric acid but a dilution is indeed wise, I would dilute it in more methanol and it is possible I might dry the solution during the process using a desiccant.

And that fanaticus site, which is mentioned by a lot of people here and over at the shroomery is great because it confirms a lot of extraction theory from the Gartz paper and also some ideas about possible reasons why an extraction might be superior to raw mushrooms. One reason that is as good as certain is avoiding the fibrous mushroom tissues that can cause indigestion apparently, and another reason that is bound to remain subjective is less mindfuck and more of the bliss-type stuff that I imagine to be a bit more in the direction of synthetic psilocin.
By the way I agree with what you said earlier MGS, psilocin is very special, I find it more akin to DMT but it has the advantage of not being such a rocket ride because of the different ROA, and generally being different anyway.
It is definitely one of the reasons why I plan on experimenting with these extractions.

I'll try to make crystals in part, a special extra pure fraction that has more novelty of course, and with the rest I guess I will make a solution with added anti-oxidants. Both meant for storage in deepfreeze.

Unfortunately I don't know a way to test if I will be successful in making sulphates... I'd basically assume that crystallizing from a low pH solution causes more indolol alkaloids to be cationic.

Thanks for the help. I'll return here if I have results.

One last thing though: I wonder what this means for my plans:

Dear Dr. Shulgin:

A friend of mine performed a Soxhlet extraction of 12 grams of powdered Psilocybe cubensis, using 95% ethanol. When the 60 mL of extract cooled to room temperature, many small transparent, colorless crystals had formed on the bottom of the container and did not redissolve on agitation. Do you know what these crystals are? -- Journeyman

Dear Journeyman:

There is a fascinating report in the literature that gives a quantitative measurement of the efficiency of extraction of both psilocybin and psilocin from the mushroom Psilocybe bohemica. The citation to the article is Kysilka, R. and Wurst, M., Planta Med. Vol. 56 pp. 327-328 (1990). These Czechoslovakian scientists studied the efficiency of both methanol and ethanol as solvents, each containing varying amounts of water. The results were, to me, both unexpected and most provocative.

The isolation of psilocybin seemed to be quite reasonable. This alkaloid is reasonably soluble in boiling water from which it can be nicely crystallized. It is less soluble in boiling methanol, and almost insoluble in boiling ethanol. And the extraction efficiency is optimum with methanol and almost as good with ethanol. With both, the less water present, the better. The compound is, after all, a perfect example of a zwitterion, the internal salt of a phosphoric acid and an amine base.

But the numbers with psilocin are strange. With aqueous ethanol, the optimum extraction was with a 70% ethanol concentration, and the extraction efficiency dropped almost to zero when there was no water present. But methanol was extremely inefficient regardless of the amount of water present in it. These researchers were apparently surprised by these findings, as they explored further and uncovered other clues. Time is a factor. Psilocin is extracted at a much slower rate than is psilocybin because it is contained intracellularly in the plant, and thus slower to be gotten out. They conclude that many of the low psilocin assays of mushrooms are due to this difficulty of getting the alkaloid out of the plant and into the extracting solvent. Using this information they determined that the levels of psilocybin and psilocin are substantially the same in Psilocybe bohemica, in conflict with the published literature values where very small amounts of psilocin were observed.

Efficient extraction apparently requires patience.

As to the identity of the crystals that were drifting around in the cooled Soxhlet receiver, from their being insoluble in ethanol, and white, and transparent, I would guess that you are seeing pure psilocybin.

-- Dr. Shulgin

It would be very cool to isolate some psilocybin as crystals separately <3
 
Last edited:
I have like 3g left from a year ago I don't really plan on taking for a long time still. I'll probably just soak them in 99% ISO for a while, filter out and evaporate off. Perhaps repeating if I think it's necessary to clean it up.


Will be taking that all at once, and since it's only 3g to begin with it shouldn't be a hell of a dose.
 
If you start off with an average dose (about 3 grams though that can indeed be strong) and use a process that is less than efficient - ISO is not ideal for starters - then you run the risk of getting less than a satisfactory dose in the end, even if you take it all.
But I would still do what you are planning because it is awesome to do experiments like this and you can get a qualitative improvement if all goes well. Good luck!
 
Yeah, I'll just have to expect a light trip or take 10mg of 4-AcO-DMT with it if I want something heavier. These things hit pretty hard at 3g, though the stomach pains often distracted from the trips.


I've made hash oil with that exact process, so this should be much harder.
 
So I have 91% ISO alcohol. Will this work? Can someone instruct me on how to do it basically, or link me. I've checked but nothing solid really for ISO extraction.
 
Yes it should work, just not exactly as well as MeOH or EtOH.

A problem could be that if you use an alcohol that is not really meant to be ingested (although IPA is not really toxic) that also contains water you will need to evaporate the solvent after extraction, and re-dissolving it is then optional.
Ethyl alcohol does not have that problem, you can just drink it after extraction. And methanol without water should evaporate with less of a problem.
To be honest I don't know if the extracted solution will make a brown goo or how fast. Remember that it is a risk and you may want to start with a small extraction first.

Here's how I think I would do it:

- You start by drying your mushrooms (if they are not dry yet), then grinding them as much as you possibly can. Maybe an electric coffee grinder is appropriate, I don't know if mortar and pestle work.
- Put the mushroom powder in a glass container, an adequate size seems to me to have it filled up for 1/3 to 1/2 part.
- Add enough solvent to cover the powder plus a little bit more so that you can stir it and still leave it covered.
- Close the container and set it aside for maybe like a day or so.
- Filter it using a coffee filter or a tea sock
- Put the liquid in another container ideally with a large surface area opened up. For example if there is little liquid left a watchglass has an ideal shape.
- If you have a fan, let it gently produce an airflow over the opened container with liquid. You can consider using the airflow coming out of your computer for this.
- Take the mushroom pulp out of the filter and put it back again in the first container.
- You can repeat the process the same way a second and even third time, or heat and simmer the mushroom/alcohol mix for maybe 1-3 hours (I think) by double-boiling. Be careful that you set up your gear so that your container does not fall over from the water vapor bubbling up and so that you don't get an insane amount of condensation dripping into it. Also make sure that you don't boil it dry. Use a limited exposed surface area, an erlenmeyer flask for example has an ideal shape here.
- Filter the alcohol when hot (watch your hands, wear protection) and let it cool, if you can slowly.
- In case you see powder or crystals forming out of the cooling alcohol solution, close the container and set it in the fridge, then after some hours set it in the freezer, some more hours or like overnight.
- Hopefully this will produce nice crystals that you can quickly filter when it is still cold.
- It's up to you if you want to pool your 2 or 3 batches or keep them separately. If you are able to crystallize some of it nicely, it can be a reason to keep it separate. Titrate your doses, initially treating that crystal as pure psilocin or psilocybin.

The powder or crystals or solid with gunky texture that you yield can be stored and administered in different ways: in solid form or redissolved in something like everclear alcohol. You might want to add an anti-oxidant like ascorbic acid (vitamin C).
Equal the resulting volume of liquid or mass of solid in strenght with the amount of mushrooms you made it from. Assume you had 100% efficiency, that way you cannot overdose, apart from misjudging the potency of your mushrooms to begin with.
If you split your batches you will need some new kind of calculation.

___________________________________________________________________

Apparently psilocin exists mostly intracellularly, so it is trapped. I wonder if doing a freeze-thaw cycle on wet mushroom tissue can allow you to extract the psilocin better. My guess is that having to mess with the gooey stuff is not worth that little bit extra, but who knows. I have had problems before with cactus snot, no idea how you can break something like that down to pull a properly filtered solution from it. Maybe with a Soxhlet.

Now that I think about it, getting a goo may have something to do with sugars. Mushroom cell walls are made of chitin, a polymer made of sugars. A known problem with extracting mushrooms using a solvent that contains water is that sugars may be extracted along with the alkaloids. Freeze-thawing mushrooms causes cell lysis. Busted cell walls may also mean sugar derivates interacting with water. Maybe it is something like making jelly or agar-agar.

So my question is: what is a known method to deal with this? Maybe you can dry the goo with fans and storing it with a desiccant for a while, then perhaps it is possible to grind it so that it may be extracted with an anhydrous alcohol?
 
Last edited:
So I have 91% ISO alcohol. Will this work? Can someone instruct me on how to do it basically, or link me. I've checked but nothing solid really for ISO extraction.

lately at some of the festivals i have been to i have noticed a bit of people doing this and selling it in caps. another guy who sold a ton of chocolates when he was there also did this, but just put them in chocolates instead.

the guy said its a simpler process than mescaline or DMT and that everclear works fine (i assume then ISO at 90%+ should be good). unfortunately i dont have experience with mushroom extraction, but mycotopia does:

https://mycotopia.net/forums/feasts-food-drink-tea-mushroom-dosing-magic-extracts/13128-shroom-extraction-teks.html

EDIT: wouldnt this yield all of the alkaloids in the mushrooms and not just psilocybin?
 
Top