So I had a concentrated acid solution of Ephedra plant kept for a long time. It had a blurry brown color with a strong smell. Yesterday I decided to extract some alkaloids from it and added NaOH solution to turn salts in freebase. After raising pH, brown precipitate formed immediately after which I waited overnight for solution to settle. This morning, I removed excess fluid and added some diluted HCl acid to turn freebase back to acid. After adding, solution became clear and white fluffy stuff precipitated and settled on the bottom. As I know both ephedrine and pseudoephedrine chloride salts are soluble in water, so it was unusual to see some precipitate in the acidic solution. Any ideas? I did not use DI water, just tap water which have some minerals but I don't think there would form some insoluble chlorides there. PS: the solution was not really dilute (there was not too much water present) so I think after adding HCl, alkaloid salts dissolved in water and created a saturated solution, and the remaining salts just precipitated out. I'm gonna filter the white fluff and dissolve in some diluted HCl acid to see if this was the case.