Piperine Extraction from Black Pepper 

I was going to say the same thing. I've done this exact extraction and my group decided to let it cycle for 2 hours and the solvent eventually would come through clear, I think we got like 70% of the piperine out.

Yeah I definitely want to try again with an equal mass of some very fresh peppercorns, think it would be a fun little proof that the pre-ground stuff is trash.

@@integral_chemistry tastebuds are usually sufficient for that. Even being old makes them weaker.

Thank you so much! I definitely make these through the lens of accessibility, I feel too long and you lose people, too much detail and you lose people, but overly dumbed-down and then it feels too much like pop-science. Glad you think I've got a good balance going on!

I was actually thinking of doing this again with diethyl ether. Boiling point is 35°C and it forms a seperate layer in solution so I could do an actual washing step with the Extract

It is more interesting and potentially useful than I think we give it credit for.. this is definitely a project I'd like to revisit eventually

That would actually be really cool! Do you know anything about its stability in organic solutions? Definitely would be a cool one.

_Adreanlin...?_ Was that what Rocky Balboa had? 😁

I've considered that honestly. I figure the oils could be separated out with a glycerin-ether extraction, the issue is separating the carotenoids from the capsaicinoids as they have such similar solubilities..

hmm yeah. the carotenoids dont have a phenol group like capsaicin though right? could you exploit the solubilities through protonation and deprotonation then? maybe the carotenoid species are too diverse for that to work. idk. @@integral_chemistry

I honestly agree with you (tbh I mentioned the thimble to avoid people trying to call me out for not using one lol). But yeah the thimble just feels too limiting. It sucks for all the reasons you mentioned and I'm not sure if my thimble is just the wrong size but I nearly had some overflow of particulate when I last tried to use it.

@@integral_chemistry Also when I am inserting the thimble, it slides on the bottom of the Soxhlet chamber pretty harshly, making a "clink" sound by hitting the glass, not sure if it will eventually crack it over multiple uses.

I actually am working on that exact project rn and what worked for me was actually dissolving the oil in glycerin and then extracting out the capsaicin with diethyl ether. Capcasin isn't soluble in glycerin but all the fats and oils are, so all the capcasin gets extracted into the ether which forms a nice seperate layer. Only issue is the red carotenoids also get extracted with the capsaicin and I've got no idea how to seperate the two :(

Nile Red isolated it from chilli peppers. But not pure

@@louwclaassens4988 exactly, like I said nobody has made the crystals.

@@louwclaassens4988 There seems to be no easy method of purifying capsaicin. There are some publications on how to do it (at least one that I know of that seems to be referenced much) and it was quite laborous. The problem is the other inmpurities that you get with excract. For smaller amounts something like chromatography is always an option but for anything but small amounts, such a simple method is no longer an option.

​@@louwclaassens4988 It's quite stubborn to purify further and it'd make boring video since it's just column chromatography.

AFAIK, capsaicin is more like wax, it does not produce good crystals

ha that is true (to be fair not much to say about such a straightfoward extraction). Always appreciate the feedback on the more experimental videos! :)

I actually did a video on that a month ago, but then I felt the video was too short and proceeded to extract citric acid and cellulose from the lemons and now the video feels too long... I'll probably just post it anyway tbh

@@integral_chemistry I suggested limonene as I always send limonene extractions videos to a friend of mine as a joke. She is a chemical engineer, but gave up after the first year working on a citrus oil extraction plant. She said she couldn't smell anything but oranges for hours after leaving the job. She went back to uni and graduated as software engineer and joined the company I work for. The orange extract trauma history is so funny when she tells, that I have to push her allindustrial processing of citrus I find!

it is honestly total trash. The yield I got from this was kinda disappointingly pathetic to the point I wasn't sure whether to post the video. Even under conservative estimates I should have gotten like 10x as much, and I know my method wasn't THAT bad

Dang. I hadn't considered this, but I bet you're right. Argh. This planet.

@@enlightenedhummingbird4764 I know, right? There's a whole market centered around spent vanilla beans. I actually came across a website selling the stuff. The spent pods are ground and mixed with glycerin and glucose and sold as "vanilla paste," and people pay top dollar for it thinking they're getting whole ground beans.

Huh I actually hadn't considered that! I'll have to give that a try next time I use it, especially since I hadn't considered using some high boiling solvents in it for that exact reason. Greetings from Massachusetts btw! I've been considering moving to Maine for years

Soxhlet

@@integral_chemistry thanks, should probably be in the description

Apparently, when ground too fine, pepper's a dick for getting past the cotton and blocking the syphon tube. I've seen more than a few people on forums, etc, who've lost soxhlets to it.

I do 100% agree. I usually always feel extraction times are overkill, but I think in this instance it would have possibly helped push the recovery to something less terrible. Definitely intend to do this again with fresh peppercorns to compare

Drugs

That could actually be a really cool vid.. I'd need to clear it with my actual place of employment first though 😅

lol fair. To be completely honest the reason I do it is because I record the audio before putting the video together and my narration only really covers the actual procedure. Bc of this I end up without enough voiceover to cover "dead space" when there's just a cool reaction happening.. The solution is to get a mic that works with my PC instead of my Rode lav-mic but the model I want is dumb expensive.

I'm actually looking into that, but still checking with RU-vid to make sure that I'd never get in trouble for it