Hi, my name is Thomas Easley, I'm the director of the Eclectic School of
Herbal Medicine and co-author of the Modern Herbal Dispensatory. Today, I'm with
Mountain Rose Herbs, and we're going to talk about making tinctures via the
maceration process. So, making maceration tinctures is
pretty easy: you just take your plant material, put it in a container, cover it
in the appropriate percentage of alcohol (as your solvent) to pull the
stuff that's inside the plant into solution, and let it sit. But, there's a
couple of tricks that will increase the potency of your preparation that
we'll talk about. So first of all, cut and sifted herbs are wonderful because
there's less exposure to oxygen than with powders, so they last longer, but the
same thing that protects this from oxygen, making it last longer, makes
it harder for your solvent (in this case a mixture of alcohol and water) to
pull all the good stuff into solution. So, what we're going to do is decrease the,
or increase the surface area, and we're gonna do that by blending it with our
menstruum. So, barberry does well in a fifty percent alcohol solution, and you
can take your plant material put in a jar cover with booze and let it sit
without measuring or weighing, but to get more consistent extracts, doing just a
little bit of preparation (weighing and measuring) helps a lot.
So most extracts are made in a 1-to-5 weight-to-volume ratio, which means
1 gram of plant material for 5 milliliters of solvent. What we're going
to do is weigh out a hundred grams of barberry
and we're going to use 500 milliliters of our 50 percent ethanol/50 percent
water mixture which we've already measured out, and we're going to throw
this into a blender so that we reduce this cut and sifted herb into a form
that's closer to a powder but maybe not quite so fine, just so that we expose more
surface area of the plant to our solvent to our menstruum.
Now that we've reduced our particle size a little bit, exposing more of our
barberry root to our menstruum, this simply goes into our jar (lots of plant material there)
and our lid goes on. Now, we label it with the Latin name, our weight-to-volume
ratio (1 to 5), 50% to ethanol, and the date, because sometimes these get lost in
cabinets and you want to make sure that it's labeled well so that you know what
it is in case that happens. And then we're gonna put this in a dark place
away from sunlight, we're gonna pull it out, we're gonna give it a shake every
day for 30 seconds, and in three to six weeks, depending on the plant, this
will be ready to go. This one doesn't take very long, about three weeks and
your barberry maceration will be done. You then can strain and filter it out,
put it in your final containers, for use. And that's how you make a standard
maceration. If you have any questions about what percentage of alcohol, or
what ratio weight-to-volume your plants need to be extracted in, our book, The
Modern Herbalist Dispensatory lists over 200 plants and their ideal weight-to-volume
ratios and alcohol percentages. Thanks so much!