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Making extracts

When I was an undergrad some 6 years ago, the graduate student I worked with and I decided we could make our own chili pepper extract, after all, we did various extractions in the lab and felt we knew what we were doing. Needless to say 6 years later with a lot more knowledge and experience, I'm still not willing to attempt to do it again even if I had a reason to.

After donning gloves, goggles, and lab coats, we set out to prove our manhood at the bar in a few weeks. After mashing the peppers, we put them in a round bottom flask and covered with acetonitrile and refluxed (for non-chemists, we boiled the solvent, and had a cooling jacket connected to the flask so the solvent condensed and went back into the flask) for 3 days. We then filtered the solid off so that we had our extract diluted in acetonitrile. We then removed the solvent and had an oily substance in our flask. It was in transfering the oil from our round bottom to the bottle we suffered the first of many pains.

During the transfer, we got a few stray drops on the lab bench and didn't notice. The next day while working on something else, my friend put his hand where the oil was, and not thinking it was the extract, washed his hands and went about his business. Later when he went to use the restroom, he transfered some to his "area" while urinating. It took a while for the capsacian to find the thinner membraned areas, but when it did I got to witness the fire dance :lol: . Despite washing his hands again after going to the bathroom, he later put his hand to his eye when adjusting his goggles :fireball: . Getting back to the extraction process...after transfering the oil to a vial, we put the vial in a vacuum oven overnight to remove the trace amounts of solvent in the oil *or so we thought*.

Vacuum ovens are great for drying trace amounts of water and solvent from solids because the solvent/water is usually adhered to the surface of the molecule. When dealing with an oil with trace amounts of solvent, the solvents are physically trapped by the oil, so the reduced pressure being applied by the vacuum has no effect because only the surface of the oil is subjected to the vacuum. So we essentially wasted our time at this step. What we ended up with was a horrible tasting extract that tasted like acetonitrile and ended up being difficult to clean and use properly, burning us for weeks to come. There, now DEFCON doesn't have to be the only person warning people to not do something needlessly stupid.
 
Thanks Mason, I just find it quite humorous that there are people on this planet that think this stuff is harmless. And to think, they are allowed to procreate...Guess someone has to create the masses that follow P.T. Barnum's best addage. LOL!
 
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