How can I, as an average person, isolate theobromine?
Hello, I am m/19 and I would like to try to isolate the substance theobromine.
I want to do this because theobromine is quite rare and occurs in small doses, like in chocolate, cocoa powder, and teas. And I would avoid sugar.
And theobromine is better than caffeine because it keeps you awake longer than caffeine.
How could one do something like that?
I would like to produce a lot of it for myself and there are no preparations for it.
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100 g Tea or tea dust are extracted with 400 ml of ethanol for 8 hours in the Soxhlet extractor. The alcoholic extract is then added to a suspension of 50 g of magnesium oxide in 300 ml of water and evaporated to dryness in a porcelain shell on the steam bath. The pulverulent residue is boiled once with 500 ml, then again three times with 250 ml of water each time and filtered off hot.
After the addition of 50 ml of dilute sulfuric acid, the combined aqueous extracts are evaporated to about 1/3, if necessary still hot, filtered off from a flocculous precipitate which forms and then extracted five times with 30 ml of chloroform each time.
The pale yellow chloroform solution is shaken with just as much water and evaporated to decolorize with a few ml of dilute sodium hydroxide solution. The remaining crude caffeine is recrystallized from little hot water. Yield 2 to 2.5 g caffeine with 1 mol of water of crystallization.
In a similar manner, Cocoa powderwhich must be degreased beforehand with petroleum ether in the extractor; theobromine insulate.
Easy, right? The fire brigade is reached under 112.
If you want to extract it from anything, it’s more expensive than any caffeine tablet, you want to synthesize it as an amateur yourself, then be assured that there is no 100% reaction. So you want to throw something in you that contains residues of toxic substances from production. I thought you were smarter when I was 19.
m.f.G.
present
Hmm, well, a big problem are mM analysis, materials, security, especially if you don’t happen to find a ‘perfect’ recipe.
Cocoa powder could be taken, if possible deoiled, which first completely degreased, for example with spirit and/or gasoline. The 1-2% of theobromine should be included…But you already need a closed apparatus that you could buy.
A chlorinated solvent, such as chloroform or dichloromethane, is required for the actual extraction. Whether you get it: questionable! Without an apparatus nyx goes there and as a chemist I wouldn’t want to have it in my apartment or kitchen.
You have a solution. In order to get rid of the solvent, it would have to be distilled off in a vacuum, for which one does not even have devices for private reasons. And even then is always the question of how pure and solvent-free the fabric is then. You can hardly find that without analysis! AND even if: I’ve still got NIE a fabric I’ve ‘produced’ myself! Although the analytics says they were inside! Pharmaceuticals then have different requirements than chemists (drug chefs but again others…)