a conventional ipa extraction can yield a fine product, but faces a number of drawbacks. filtration of the powdered root can be quite difficult, and a significant amount of solvent is required.i performed a small experiment to test the viability of a new method. a strong kava was prepared with hot water, by conventional means. to this, a small ammount of ipa was added. the solution immediately separated into a transparent yellow liquid, and a suspended cloudy component. the cloudy component, which i presume was the starch falling out of solution, was easily filtered off with a conventional paper filter.table salt was then added to the solution until it reached saturation, and separated into distinct layers. the upper layer, consisting of the light alcohol and active components, was siphoned off and evaporated. resulting material appeared fairly pure, and had a significant numbing effect on the tongue.it will take significant experimentation to optimize this process, but i think it has merit. what do you guys think?
a novel extraction
- Thread starter kl.voodoo
- Start date
starsofclay
Kava Enthusiast
what if you just put kava powder in a nylon bag or pantyhose(which is what i use), drop that into a container of ONLY ipa, and let it dissolve the components for a few days, then pull the pantyhose bag out, squeeze everything out, into the container, throw away the kava powder, and then evaporate the alchohol- it should make a concentrated instant kava right?
also, the starch falling out of the solution, isn't that considered good? i thought it was the starches from kava extractions that are what has the kavain
also, the starch falling out of the solution, isn't that considered good? i thought it was the starches from kava extractions that are what has the kavain
Stop right now.
Alcohol+ kava= dramatic increase in chance of liver damage.
The alcohol destroys a key component in the kava that you do not want destroyed. I'll have to dig up the scientific names again if you want a technical explanation though. But basically...stop.
This was part of what lead to all the trouble kava had in it's early days on the market. Solvents do not play well with kava at all. Alcohol is right in there to.
Alcohol+ kava= dramatic increase in chance of liver damage.
The alcohol destroys a key component in the kava that you do not want destroyed. I'll have to dig up the scientific names again if you want a technical explanation though. But basically...stop.
This was part of what lead to all the trouble kava had in it's early days on the market. Solvents do not play well with kava at all. Alcohol is right in there to.
starsofclay - that is the conventional extraction i referred to. it works fine, but i was just experimenting with another method. it will produce a yellow oily product with a honey-like consistency. not an "instant kava" as it is not water soluble, but quite potent. the oily active compounds in kava bind to the starch, but in my method the alcohol dissolves them away from the starch, and it can be removed.
vekta - it is my understanding that the hepatotoxicity is a result of reactions inside the body when kavalactones and alcohol are present, and the early problems with marketed products was tied to use of upper portions of the plant or possibly misidentified plants. at any rate, i will certainly investigate this before i consume any significant amount of extract.
edit: now that i think about it, i know what you're talking about vekta. i think i have that paper somewhere. it's a component not destroyed by the alcohol, but left behind as it is water soluble. guess i forgot about that. (smiley: eyes)
vekta - it is my understanding that the hepatotoxicity is a result of reactions inside the body when kavalactones and alcohol are present, and the early problems with marketed products was tied to use of upper portions of the plant or possibly misidentified plants. at any rate, i will certainly investigate this before i consume any significant amount of extract.
edit: now that i think about it, i know what you're talking about vekta. i think i have that paper somewhere. it's a component not destroyed by the alcohol, but left behind as it is water soluble. guess i forgot about that. (smiley: eyes)
voodoo said:
Unfortunately, it doesn't stop there. If I can get all this quadratic equation homework (and review for midterm) done I'll go dig through my files in the closet and find that info again. Basically there is a key component that is produced by our liver that is also present in kava. The extra we get from kava acts sort of like a buffer so there is no chance of overtaxing the liver by feeding it both Alcohol and lactones at the same time. Besides the synergetic effect Alcohol has with kava it diminishes the liver's capability to process it all within safe parameters. The best example I can think of is a compromised immune system. The Alcohol diminishes the body's defenses by #1 being present and #2 by altering the "stuff" that is kava before it ever touches your tongue.
kl.Kavalogue
Kava Curious
Hi Vekta, all the files of informations interest me, please send me them too, or any that is interesting. I'm making a zip file with all the files I found about kava and will share it soon.
I posted this a few months ago: The naturally occurring glutathione in the root powder protects the liver this study finds...
Ok, I found the study.
http://www.sciencedirect....le/pii/S0031942203003819
From the summary, section 7
Based on the evidence discussed in this paper, the reason that kava lactones have been linked to hepatotoxicity is due to their dependence on the cytochrome P450 enzymes for clearance by the liver. The safe use of kava-kava has continued for many years and has been documented. In all traditional preparations of the kava root, the kava lactones are balanced by the availability of glutathione in the preparation. In the tablet and capsule forms of standardized extracts that relate to the reported cases of hepatotoxicity, only the kava lactones have been present in the products and no additional glutathione taken with the product.
Based on the dosages reported to cause problems by the Medicines Control Agency (Anon, 2001) and those reported by Clough (2002), the only difference is the glutathione levels which would explain the differences in toxicity.
Ok, I found the study.
http://www.sciencedirect....le/pii/S0031942203003819
From the summary, section 7
Based on the evidence discussed in this paper, the reason that kava lactones have been linked to hepatotoxicity is due to their dependence on the cytochrome P450 enzymes for clearance by the liver. The safe use of kava-kava has continued for many years and has been documented. In all traditional preparations of the kava root, the kava lactones are balanced by the availability of glutathione in the preparation. In the tablet and capsule forms of standardized extracts that relate to the reported cases of hepatotoxicity, only the kava lactones have been present in the products and no additional glutathione taken with the product.
Based on the dosages reported to cause problems by the Medicines Control Agency (Anon, 2001) and those reported by Clough (2002), the only difference is the glutathione levels which would explain the differences in toxicity.
kl.Kavalogue
Kava Curious
Thank you
I don't have access, could you send me the PDF please ?
I don't have access, could you send me the PDF please ?
from what i can find, it seems glutathione is quite poorly absorbed when taken orally. it may be wise to try to boost your levels with a precursor. l-acetylcystein seems to be the best bet. there is also a milk thistle extract said to boost glutathione, if that's more your thing.
- and indeed; glutathione is soluble in water, and insoluble in alcohol.
perhaps in my method, the michael reaction would occur while in the aqueous solution, breaking the lactone ring prior to the separation into the alcohol layer. it's all a bit over my head. (smiley: nerd)
- and indeed; glutathione is soluble in water, and insoluble in alcohol.
perhaps in my method, the michael reaction would occur while in the aqueous solution, breaking the lactone ring prior to the separation into the alcohol layer. it's all a bit over my head. (smiley: nerd)
The above excerpt was exactly what I was going to go find. It may be the case that it's absorbed poorly when taken orally but it still seems to be just enough to keep everything square. I haven't come across any other explanation as to why traditionally prepared kava is safe and one prepared with an alcohol solution isn't but 3000 years of history and 30+ years of documentation by Dr. Lebot and others is pretty convincing to me even if they don't connect the dots with a line just yet.Kavalogue said:
kl.Kavalogue
Kava Curious
OK, sorry, thank you 
kl.Gray Owl
Kava Enthusiast
A more recent paper reported that alcohol extracts FlavoKawain B, which causes liver damage. Taking supplements with n-acetyl cysteine (NAC) and R-alpha lipoic acid (RLA) are precursors of glutathione and *might* make up for the lost glutathione. However, based on my experience with other ethnobotanicals, there are often other phytochemicals that are important, whether they are present or absent from the final product when it is prepared in the traditional method--some of these chemicals we may not yet even know about or have identified--so I think deviating to far from the traditional method is probably bad news.
Latest research demonstrates toxicity with HepG2 liver cells caused by FlavoKawain B which is apparently extracted when alcohol/acetone are used with kava and NOT extracted when water is used.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20696856
Edit: bluelight.ru would probably be a better place to get info on IPA extractions, I didn't fit with the culture there except for some of the psychedelics discussions. I still think it's a bad idea.
Latest research demonstrates toxicity with HepG2 liver cells caused by FlavoKawain B which is apparently extracted when alcohol/acetone are used with kava and NOT extracted when water is used.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20696856
Edit: bluelight.ru would probably be a better place to get info on IPA extractions, I didn't fit with the culture there except for some of the psychedelics discussions. I still think it's a bad idea.
kl.Gray Owl
Kava Enthusiast
OK I looked this up and Michael reaction is the nucleophilic addition of a carbanion to an alpha,beta-unsaturated carbonyl compound, basically you are taking something that has a double bond and extending it by adding on an R group while changing the double bond to a single bond. Breaking a lactone ring would be the hydrolysis of an ester, as a lactone is a cyclic ester, there is no alpha,beta carbon double bond that you could add on to. Also, it is thought that desmethoxy- compounds are MAO-B inhibitors and responsible for the euphoric effects of kava by inhibiting dopamine reuptake. In my experience, most MAO inhibitors are cyclic compounds, that conformation is necessary to bind to the active site of MAO, if you break the ring converting it to a chain then it is no longer active.voodoo said:
But this could also be a useful clue here as well. I read some of your other posts and see that you are having more problems with nausea from kava with high DMH, and probably the other desmethoxy- compounds as well that are more present in the lateral roots. I would guess that you may be suffering effects similar to too much use of MAOI from the accumulation of amines and probable dependence, that could be a dangerous situation, but quitting cold turkey would also be dangerous. Also, if you are consuming drugs that contain amines, which is most drugs really--antihistamines, decongestants, amino acid supplements like tyrosine or tryptophan, melatonin--all those things could be having an effect or accumulating in your system as well. You may need to withdraw for a bit to reduce your tolerance as well as the nausea and to purge some of the amines from your system, that is just the way it goes with MAOIs unfortunately. The nausea is like nature's way of telling you that things are starting to go toxic and your body doesn't like it, at least that is how I look at it.
Ideally, this should be done with physician supervision as you could get severe hypotension and other side effects. If you want to read up on it bluelight.ru would be a good resource as there are people experienced with this sort of problem on there. Anyway, be careful man, it sounds like you have some experience with other things like opioids, so may be aware of some of the dangers and how these things go, also chronic pain issues, I am no stranger to that with Crohn's Disease, which is how I ended up here myself. I've been thinking about trying acupuncture to lower my usage of certain things as that is supposed to increase things like dopamine endogenously, I'm skeptical that I could get by with only acupuncture but maybe I could use less of other things then. Anyway, good luck, hope it all works out.
kl.Gray Owl
Kava Enthusiast
This is an interesting puzzle and I tend to obsess on things once I start thinking about them, so I continue to think about all this. Kava is a bit unusual in that it is an emulsion of something that is not soluble in water, but seems to emulsify more easily than lipids. Water is a strongly polar protic solvent. Ethanol and acetone are somewhat less polar and aprotic. Water forms very strong hydrogen bonds, as evidenced by its high surface tension, and one of the reasons that it makes good emulsions. So, high surface tension is one of the properties that you would be looking for if you were looking for an alternative solvent. An extraction with an alcohol is not an emulsion, in that case you are using a solvent to actually dissolve substances, and it is suspected that is where you get into trouble with solvent extractions from kava, substances like kawain may dissolve well in alcohols and ketones, but for some reason do not emulsify as well as the desirable kavalactones. It has sort of the feel as a liquid-liquid extraction where you are trying to separate things that are differentially soluble in two different phases.
An interesting experiment would be liquid chromatography with a solvent gradient. I am mostly familiar with using ionic strength or pH gradient, but I think it could be done. Probably what you would do is load a column by suspending solvent-extracted kava in a neutral matrix with water. Then you would set up a gradient with pure water and alcohol or acetone. You would take fractions of several ml and later these would be analyzed ideally by gas chromatography, trying to get some idea of what concentration the good stuff comes off and when the bad stuff comes off the column. Ideally, you want to get good separation of the bad and good substances, assuming that is even possible using a solvent rather than an emulsion.
Another problem with kava is that if you were going to try something like a soxhlet, you need a solvent that boils well below about 60 C at a temperature that the kavalactones are stable. Alternatively, you could hydrolize the lactone turn it into a soluble salt, crystallize, redissolve and form the lactone again, but that will make a racemic mixture depending which side of the carbon forms the lactone, and I don't know if anybody knows the properties of the other enantiomer as it probably does not occur in nature as enzymatic reactions tend to be stereospecific. Possibly you could co-crystallize with pure R or L carvone and that might separate the enantiomers fairly well, but then you would need to determine which enantiomer is crystallized and if it's the one that you want. This is probably more expensive and a bigger PITA than justified if you are not making this in bulk.
A Deep Eutectic Solvent (DES) could be interesting especially glycerol with choline chloride, which is used to remove glycerol in the production of biodiesel. I'm not sure what temperature it boils at but know that the melting point is much lower than either water or glycerin, so it might be low enough. I still think this is a bad idea, but damn it's an interesting chemical engineering problem. I think supercritical CO2 is probably the best way and kava extract produced that way is available from Paradise, but still no guarantee that the product is completely safe, and obviously it requires specialized and very expensive equipment that is hard to justify if you're not making it in bulk.
I also thought some about how other emulsions are produced in general. I think that shaking vigorously, like in a closed jar, could be interesting and possibly work better than a blender, I think that one might be worth trying. Mortar and pestle could also be interesting.
An interesting experiment would be liquid chromatography with a solvent gradient. I am mostly familiar with using ionic strength or pH gradient, but I think it could be done. Probably what you would do is load a column by suspending solvent-extracted kava in a neutral matrix with water. Then you would set up a gradient with pure water and alcohol or acetone. You would take fractions of several ml and later these would be analyzed ideally by gas chromatography, trying to get some idea of what concentration the good stuff comes off and when the bad stuff comes off the column. Ideally, you want to get good separation of the bad and good substances, assuming that is even possible using a solvent rather than an emulsion.
Another problem with kava is that if you were going to try something like a soxhlet, you need a solvent that boils well below about 60 C at a temperature that the kavalactones are stable. Alternatively, you could hydrolize the lactone turn it into a soluble salt, crystallize, redissolve and form the lactone again, but that will make a racemic mixture depending which side of the carbon forms the lactone, and I don't know if anybody knows the properties of the other enantiomer as it probably does not occur in nature as enzymatic reactions tend to be stereospecific. Possibly you could co-crystallize with pure R or L carvone and that might separate the enantiomers fairly well, but then you would need to determine which enantiomer is crystallized and if it's the one that you want. This is probably more expensive and a bigger PITA than justified if you are not making this in bulk.
A Deep Eutectic Solvent (DES) could be interesting especially glycerol with choline chloride, which is used to remove glycerol in the production of biodiesel. I'm not sure what temperature it boils at but know that the melting point is much lower than either water or glycerin, so it might be low enough. I still think this is a bad idea, but damn it's an interesting chemical engineering problem. I think supercritical CO2 is probably the best way and kava extract produced that way is available from Paradise, but still no guarantee that the product is completely safe, and obviously it requires specialized and very expensive equipment that is hard to justify if you're not making it in bulk.
I also thought some about how other emulsions are produced in general. I think that shaking vigorously, like in a closed jar, could be interesting and possibly work better than a blender, I think that one might be worth trying. Mortar and pestle could also be interesting.
kl.Gray Owl
Kava Enthusiast
I've been playing with choline chloride and glycerol and it has some very unusual properties, but choline chloride is extremely salty in a way that I have not encountered with organic compounds before. Just to clarify that's NOT with kava, but with some other botanicals where ethanol and acetone extraction have not been a problem.