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Tinctures: When in Doubt DIY, Part 1

Thursday, August 4, 2016 14:29

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I have to confess, with all my kitchen witchery and all my DIY philosophy about just about everything I can make myself, I have had tincture fear for several years. Despite making salves, teas, oils, and hand-milled soap, tinctures are a recent thing for me. In the past, I’ve used them for emergencies, having calendula and chamomile tinctures on hand for kitty first aid, was essential. But for some reason I always thought they were more complicated and something out of my reach.

In recent years, as I incorporated tinctures into my own regimen, I wasted money buying them, thinking that in order to make tinctures I needed more equipment or more training. Reading Richo Cech’s description of making tinctures in Making Plant Medicine added even more trepidation with his complicated formulas. Despite my exposure to the work of wise women like Rosemary Gladstar and Kiva Rose, I still had some qualms about making tinctures.

Until last year when Anthony and I attended the Herbal Imaginarium in Brooklyn and we were exposed to chuchuhuasi tincture—which in and of itself is the topic of another article, hence the Part 1. Getting so much help from the first exposure to this tincture meant I needed to add it to my regimen. But, over the next few days, I couldn’t find this tincture anywhere online—so I knew I had to make it myself. I was able to get the material, not easily (again topic of my chuchuhuasi article) and the result, 6 weeks later was my first tincture.

Chuchuhuasi was literally my gateway to tincture making. At the time, I had been using tincture of wild yam regularly. I should have taken a picture of it, but when I was using that ready-made tincture, as I already said, I really hadn’t thought of making my own tinctures. The color was very dark, almost black. Regardless of shaking the bottle, about three quarters into the bottle, there was a tar-like sediment and needless to say the taste was awful– like tar-water, really acrid. The smell wasn’t much better. The tincture I was using was a mass-market brand. The cost also went up significantly and if a bottle of this tincture cost me more than $10, I considered getting the material in bulk from Mountain Rose Herbs (MRH) and making my own. But, when I first thought of it, MRH was out of stock on the bulk wild yam. I didn’t want to make a special order of their wild yam tincture, so I thought I’d keep using what I already had of the mass-market brand with a mind towards making my own at some distant point in the future.

A quick talk about cost of tincture making, using the wild yam to give you an idea of the cost differential.

The cost of MRH’s Wild Yam (wildharvested from the USA) is $23 a pound, but keep in mind 1 pound will make a lot of tincture. The initial cost for the bulk herbs, roots, barks, and fungi at first glance seem more expensive than buying a simple bottle of tincture. But, in the long-run, the cost is far less and the gain is more since you have total control over what you’re making. I estimate that I was spending $10 a month on wild yam tincture, more or less, not including shipping, handling and tax. Let’s ballpark that at $120 for a year’s worth– or $120 for 24 oz of tincture. I got my pound from MRH for $23 and a handle of vodka from the local liquor store for $16. Using that entire bottle of vodka, gave me just under 60 ounces of tincture when all was said and done– and I only used half a pound of root, again ballparking the measurement. So, for about $30 I was able to make well over 1 year’s worth of tincture, when it cost me quadruple that to buy it ready-made. The taste of my tincture is still bitter; it is a bitter root after all, but it doesn’t leave me gagging.

Of course the cost changes radically depending on the cost of the material you’re making the tincture from, your dosage, and how many folks you’re making the tincture for. My chuchuhuasi tincture is what I go through very quickly and has to be the costlier one taking into account the cost of the bark itself. Chuchuhuasi tincture is now available via Herbs America, where I get my bulk bark. The Herbs America tincture costs $15.99 for 1 ounce. I use 1 ounce a week, for myself and my husband, and am making the tincture for my mother as well, so taking her into account– I’d need about 1.5 ounces per week or 6 ounces a month, more or less. I can’t afford $100 a month to buy it from Herbs America. The bulk bark is now $39.99 a pound and 1 pound is enough for several months of tincture. So again, the initial cost seems like a lot, but if tinctures are to become your thing (if they aren’t already), in the long-run making your own will save you a lot of green.

The other tinctures I was exposed to at that Herbal Imaginarium were cat’s claw and pau d’arco. I tried cat’s claw and, like the chuchuhuasi, I saw a significant improvement in a matter of minutes. I didn’t try the pau d’arco, but, at the time, I had been reading up on other herbs to add to my regimen and pau d’arco kept coming up. As most kitchen witches will tell you, when you keep turning corners and discovering the same herb, the medicine of that plant is trying to tell you something about the benefits of that medicine for you. So when I ran into pau d’arco again for the umpteenth time, I settled on making an order from MRH of these herbs—only to find that they were out of stock on cat’s claw, pau d’arco, and still out of wild yam; they didn’t carry chuchuhuasi in any form. I did make my first MRH tincture order since they did have tinctures of cat’s claw, pau d’arco, and wild yam in stock.

I know from reading MRH blog and being a customer of theirs for more than a decade now, Rosemary Gladstar is a big influence on their recipes. Her tincture recipes use the simpler’s method and call for brandy, vodka, or Everclear. Since I don’t work for MRH, I don’t know what method they use to make their tinctures, so I’m not saying they use a Gladstar approach. However, they do note their tinctures are made in smaller batches and they’ve blogged about tincture making. Since their recipes are very much like Gladstar’s approach, I’d guess their products are likewise very similar in recipe.

When I received my MRH order of tinctures, the first thing I noticed was the radical difference in color between my mass market wild yam and the MRH tincture. The smell was also markedly different, there was zero sediment in the bottle, and the flavor, while still bitter, was also different, less tar-like. Since I now make my own wild yam tincture, I can say that my tincture is nearly identical in color, flavor, and effect to the MRH tincture. So in a pinch, if I can’t make my own for whatever reason, I trust their tinctures 100%.

Even though it’s an excellent idea to make your own tinctures, I would highly recommend that before getting all the bulk material, buy a bottle of the tincture from a reputable company like Mountain Rose Herbs, or Herbs America (for more exotic tinctures like chuchuhuasi that aren’t sold at MRH). The reason? Tinctures, like all medicines (herbal or otherwise), can have unique reactions to you. If you aren’t keen on the reaction, you don’t want to be stuck with half a gallon of a tincture you can’t use, right? I’ll give you an example. Gotu Kola. It’s a life-line for my epilepsy. I’ve already blogged about how it’s helped reduce the quantity and severity of my seizures since I’ve been using it. Primarily I use it in capsule form, which I make myself from the powdered herb, which I powder myself– but I also have gotu kola in a tea blend I take most evenings. Recently, I was running out of my bulk dried Gotu Kola and MRH was also out of stock. I kept checking back but they were out of stock for well over 6 months. When I made an order a few weeks ago, I opted to order their Gotu Kola tincture. As I began conserving my own gotu kola, I stopped my tea and instead tried the MRH gotu kola tincture. Within 20 minutes, I had a small seizure. I figured I was tired and I didn’t immediately make the connection. The next night, same thing and the seizure was a little more intense. This repeated for 4 successive nights and included restless sleep from being woken up by a seizure. I almost fell out of bed because of it– and my epilepsy is not characterized by complex seizures. The last time I took the tincture, when I really added it up and realized a tincture of gotu kola had the opposite effect of a tea or capsule, I actually had the closest thing to a grand mal seizure that I’ve had in 8 years. I was seizing for 45 minutes with post-seizure effects that lasted into the next day. I’m happy that I didn’t waste the bulk herb, the alcohol, or the time to make my own gotu kola tincture to have the same reaction.

Since this experience, tincture making is part of my routine. At any given time, I have over half a dozen different jars steeping and since hubby and I have recently stumbled across new tinctures that we’ve added to our regimen, the jar count has grown.

If I only had the space, I’d have a tincture pantry like this…

Source: http://www.green-and-growing.com/2016/08/tinctures-when-in-doubt-diy-part-1.html

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