[mnakhla]

So, I recently extracted some piperdine from about half a pound of black pepper.
I did multiple extractions with boiling water, and also hydrolized the piperine in the black pepper, to yeild more piperdine, using about 150 mls of a low molarity sodium hydroxide solution.
I seperated the bulk solution of about 200 mls into 2 seperate solutions, one of them was about 50 ml and the other 150ml.
I extracted the 50 ml with chloroform to try to seperate out any extra piperine. I left the 150 ml solution as is.
I then hit both solutions with a few mls of 93% sulfuric acid to capture the piperdine as a salt and proceeded to boil down both the solutions to remove any other voltile organics that might have been extracted along the way.
The result of that was a brown sludge to which i added water and more sodium hydroxide. The resulting brown solutions smelled horrid. What was previously the 50 ml solution now had a distint fishy smell with no other smells dectecable.
and what was previously the 150 ml solution had a horrid fishy smell along with a few other detectable components.
the two solutions were then distilled yeilding about 100 mls (so, far they are distilling at the moment) of an fishy  and almost grassy smelling solution of piperdine in water. Now the issue is piperdine distills at 106 degrees C and water of course at 100 degrees C.
What is the best route of seperating the two, capture the piperdine as a salt and dry it? then re-hydrolyze and dry it over calcium chloride?
or fractional distillation using a 2.5 foot high fractionating column ( thats all of my  ground glass condensers and glass plate columns on top of each other except for one used for condensing =P, plus any higher then that and it will get close to hitting the top of my fumehood).

Any ideas or comments will be much appreciated.
also be aware that I am doing this at home so I do not have access to a stupidly large array of chemicals.

Thank you,
Mnakhla

[Fleaker]

Doing some peptide syntheses at home are we? Really, there are other reagents that can be used--piperidine is quite boring and having it can get you into some trouble.

Seriously though, making piperidine from piperine seems rather stupid. Might have better luck with hydrogenation of pyridine over Adam's catalyst. That's a more noble project!

[mnakhla]

Well, I was extracting it from black pepper I just did the hydrolysis from the peprine because it was simple, atleast to my knowledge it is, and it increased my yield so why not?

but the issue with using pyridine is where do i get it? and no I actually had no plans to do peptide synthesis with it I was just attempting to make it/ extract it.