Making Your Own Tinctures at Home
Making tinctures is a very uncomplicated thing. Did you know that making your own tinctures was as common as cooking for the whole history of man until the early 20th century when modern medicine started forcibly taking over the province of people’s health? I mean Everybody knew how to do it.
They also made their own alcohol too. That was an art though. People would get really into developing just the right taste from both fermentation and then steam distillation with the just right combination of botanicals.
Absinthe was made in this way for example. Wormwood and green anise and other nuance botanicals were soaked in alcohol which was made by fermentation and then it was steam distilled which removed the plants essential oils from the water and these oils would be captured along with the alcohol coming off as a gas at a lower temperature than the water would come off. The gas was collected and allowed to condense back into a liquid with much much less water content. This was called a Spirit as opposed to a Wine. Wine is just a straight ferment and is not distilled.
Well, if people were skilled enough to do that then simply soaking a botanical in 40% to 60% alcohol, which means 80 to 120 proof is a no brainer.
Have you ever wondered why they call it 100 proof instead of 50% alcohol? I have for a long time. When I was a kid I thought proof and percentage were the same until I saw 120 Proof on a bottle.
Well it turns out that it’s just a part of history. There was no lab test back then to determine alcohol percentage and the government had a different tax for strong alcohol and weaker alcohol.
So they had this weird test. They would soak some gunpowder in the liquid and then try to light it. If it lit, it had more alcohol in it than water. So it would get the higher tax. If it didn’t it had more water than alcohol and it would get the lower tax rate. It was called above proof or below proof. It wasn’t all that accurate because of the variations of gunpowder and temperature and length of time in the alcohol etc.
Then when other more exact methods were developed the word proof didn’t go away it stuck. I guess people liked it. In England they used a different test than in the US and there, proof multiplied by 4/7 equaled the percentage of alcohol. So 100% alcohol was 175 proof. 50% alcohol was just under 88 proof. Their test utilized specific gravity measurements. Specific gravity has to do with comparing how dense one substance is compared to another.
To make a long story short, different countries all had different proof systems. France’s was the most simple. If it was 50% alcohol it was 50 Proof. No math needed, but it sure led to some surprised, drunk Americans, ha ha.
That’s because in the US in 1848 it was arbitrarily determined that Proof was twice the percentage of alcohol by volume. So if it was 100 proof it was 50% alcohol by volume.
By volume is not 100% accurate because water and alcohol mix in a funny way which reduces the volume a little when you mix them together, but for simplicity that is ignored. You only see it at the top when maximum alcohol content turns out to be 190 to 192 Proof instead of 200. It is really only 95 to 96% alcohol even though before you mixed it the math worked out to 100%. But that’s a whole other story that I’d love to tell you about because I am a chemist and I find it fascinating, but that would be going a little off the subject.
I am tempted to tell you the name of the phenomenon so you can look it up if you are curious, but I want everybody to stay awake and a word like that could put you out cold. Ha Ha. I know! You can just google the question,“why can’t you make pure alcohol by simple distillation?” That’s so I don’t leave my fellow curious sorts hanging :).
Although you can’t get 100% alcohol by distillation because of this, you can get it by other chemical means. My father could get 100% alcohol at the drug store because he was a pharmacist. And my uncle would make the most delicious creme de cocoa with it, but then all of a sudden it was illegal to have 100% potable alcohol. They started denaturing it for tax purposes. Denaturing meant that other poisonous alcohols were added to it to ensure that it was being used in industry and not to make alcoholic drinks. I missed my uncles creme de cacao after that.
Although you will see the Proof number shown prominently on a bottle of hard liquor today, that is by choice. It’s a historical tradition. It is now required by law that somewhere on the label the ABV or alcohol by volume be listed. This makes sense to me. Ha ha what a tradition. Lots of error because of it.
Why is this important? Well the more you know about the ingredients you make a tincture with, the better. And alcohol is common to all true tinctures.
Because of the rise of concerns about alcohol, vinegar extracts by popular use started to be called a tincture. It is not a proper usage, but popularity has a way of overcoming proper sometimes.
Vinegar is not capable of pulling out all that alcohol can. No contest. There are also other things you can soak herbs in that will make a liquid containing some of the properties of the herb, but those are called extracts, not tinctures.
The list of extracts in order of efficiency are alcohol, glycerin, a combination of vinegar and honey called an Oxymel, vinegar and water. So you see vinegar is not so hotsy totsy compared to alcohol.
Did you know that there are stricter rules on the purity of water required to be used for alcoholic beverages than there is for babyfood? This was always puzzling to me. I guess the power elite don’t consume baby food, but they love their vodka.
Vodka is the most commonly used alcohol to make a tincture because of its neutral taste. But gin and brandy are sometimes used to create a tasty tincture.
In the olden days you had to make your alcohol by fermenting things yourself. Vodka was traditionally fermented potatoes. Now it is rarely potatoes. It is mostly made from grains. And then steam distilled and filtered so there is nothing but water and ethanol left. This is why it is the most used alcohol for tinctures. No real taste except the alcohol. Gin starts this same way but then during the distillation flavors via steam distilled botanicals are introduced. Juniper berries are the only requirement to make it gin, but there are many many recipes to add nuances to that.
Brandy is made from fermented fruits and starts out the same as wine and retains a sweetness because of that. But then it is steam distilled which refines it and increases the alcohol content.
It is a whole lot of bother to make the same quality of alcohol yourself because you would have to have a still. And you probably couldn’t have stricter purity rules than the liquor store brands and in a pretty bottle too. (Oh and I forgot, they made home stills for potable alcohol illegal.)
Have you ever walked through a liquor store looking at the spectacular bottles they use? They get designed by actors and famous designers. I used to ask my ex-husband to get certain brands. I didn’t drink, but I was excited to get the pretty glass bottles.
So now you know about alcohol. The only other thing you need to know now is about the herbs.
I’ll leave that to all my other blogs as I couldn’t even begin to impart all that data here.
You can make a tincture out of anything. Alcohol will pull out both the water and the fat soluble parts and any resins. This ensures you can get all the beneficial phytochemicals out of the botanical you use.
Here’s the simple recipe to make a tincture. Get a nice glass container. Fill it halfway with vodka or your alcohol of choice as long as it is at least 40% alcohol. Get the best botanical you can. Fresh is best and the traditional way to make a tincture. Chop it, grind it or just throw it in whole. Top it off with more alcohol and put the top or cap on and wait. The alcohol will start breaking down the vegetable matter.
The longer you wait, the stronger in phytochemicals it will become. It is considered done in about a year, but it will have benefits in 6 weeks and continually get stronger. After a year you can bottle it in smaller bottles leaving some plant residue so it will continue to get stronger. If you don’t need to bottle it, just leave it as a source of that herb for whenever you need it. Label it so you can have many herbs and not get mixed up.
When you want to use it just use a dropper by the dose. If you are concerned about the alcohol, make a hot tea and squirt the dropperful into the tea and the alcohol will greatly reduce by evaporation. If you have used a very strong alcohol, you can also dilute the liquid to your taste.
Stir the alcohol and herbs around once in a while in the big jar to break up the plant matter and you can use a pipet (A giant dropper) to pull out some ounces to fill up a tincture bottle for convenience or to share with friends, family or clients. Don’t worry about filtering. It is good to include some residue because it will contribute to the strength of the tincture over time.
This is the way natural pharmacies are made. One jar at a time. Pharmacies like this were very common amongst people before they were eliminated.
In the late 1800’s into the 20th Century, the US had a golden age of medicine where many of the doctors of the day started abandoning the then current practices because, “They were tired of watching their patients die of blood letting and other barbaric ‘modern’ practices.” The reference I got this from is out of the Emory herbarium files. I discovered it a while back when I was researching Black Cohosh for you. It was written in 1905 right when it was all happening.
These were the very best trained doctors from “the best” medical schools stepping away from the mainstream and declaring themselves eclectic. They studied everything around them and adopted only the workable things from each practice.
They made heavy use of these tinctures and also homeopathy- The things that worked.
This was apparently very threatening to some and the golden age was ended in the covert black propaganda war that ended the eclectics and the homeopaths. And then they spread false tech to mess people up that still wanted to continue with those practices. The tech of homeopathy was twisted to be a biochemical therapy instead of the energy therapy that it was. And of course alcohol was vilified too.
And then they targeted the personal stills of the people, of course for the “best” reasons of social concern.
All this coincided with the start of the pharmaceutical industry which poo pooed all tinctures except laudenum, an opium extract. And don’t get me started on that! I’ll just say that the medical cure for opium addiction was morphine and the medical cure for morphine was heroine and the medical cure for heroine is methadone. Do I have to say more?
Don’t ya think it’s about time we took back the province of our own health instead of trusting it to them? Have they ever been trustworthy?
You can start small. Buy a fifth of vodka and break up some Herbal Roots capsules that you regularly use. It’s just the herb powder. It doesn’t have preservatives in it so you can’t save it forever in powder form. You can even just put the powder right into the vodka bottle and make your own personal formula and just take one squirt instead of swallowing ten different capsules.
Just a suggestion. But I would love to see everyone spark awake and take back responsibility for human health. Look around. You couldn’t do a worse job than what is being done now.
Knowing that you can make a tincture could be the first step of that empowerment. I hope I have given you some ideas.