Read the iron rules first
The playbook's own iron rules are blunt about this and they are right: plant remedies are unreliable, variable in strength, and no substitute for real medicine. Nothing on this page changes that.
What tinctures genuinely are: a way to extract and preserve plant constituents for years, at a strength you can state and repeat. That makes them useful for the things the remedies chapter already covers, and it does not make them a pharmacy.
What they are not: a treatment for infection, for anything on the sepsis or wound infection pages, or for any serious condition. Stock real medicine while you can.
Why a stated ratio matters
A jar of unmeasured herb in unmeasured vodka is not a preparation, because you cannot say how strong it is, cannot repeat it, and cannot dose it sensibly.
Two batches made by eye can differ several-fold in strength. That is fine for a flavouring and useless for anything you are taking for an effect, and it becomes actively risky with any plant that has a meaningful dose-response.
A stated ratio fixes all of that, and it costs nothing but a set of scales.
The ratios
Fresh herb uses a tighter ratio because it is mostly water already, and that water dilutes the alcohol in the jar. That is also why fresh plant work needs stronger alcohol to start with, below.
The liquid is called the menstruum. It is alcohol, or alcohol and water, and occasionally vinegar or glycerine.
Choosing the alcohol
Different constituents dissolve in different alcohol strengths, which is the part most home guides skip.
Practically, in a UK kitchen: ordinary 37.5 to 40% vodka is the usual starting point and is adequate for most dried herb work, sitting at the lower end. Overproof spirits, where you can get them, are better for fresh plant work and for resinous material.
Do not use methylated spirits, surgical spirit, isopropanol or any denatured alcohol. They are poisonous. Only drinkable spirit.
Making it
- Weigh the herb. Chop or crush it to increase surface area. Dried material can be broken up; fresh should be chopped finely.
- Calculate the menstruum from the ratio and measure it by volume.
- Pack the herb into a clean dry jar and pour the alcohol over it.
- Make sure everything is submerged. Anything above the liquid will mould and spoil the batch. Weigh it down or top up.
- Seal, label immediately with the plant, the part used, the ratio, the alcohol percentage and the date.
- Store somewhere cool and dark, and shake daily for the first week, then every few days.
- Leave 4 to 6 weeks.
- Strain through muslin, squeezing the marc hard to recover the liquid held in it.
- Bottle in dark glass, relabel, and store cool and dark.
Shelf life is years for an alcohol tincture at 40% or above, which is the main practical advantage over teas and infusions.
Labelling and dosing
An unlabelled tincture is not usable and should be discarded. Twelve months later nobody remembers what is in a dark bottle, and guessing is exactly the failure this whole page is written to prevent.
On dosing, this app will not print dose tables. Doses vary by plant, by preparation strength, by the person, and by what else they take, and a table of teaspoons written from memory is precisely the kind of authoritative-looking guess the canning pages refuse to make for the same reason. Use a reputable herbal reference, and start low.
Non-alcohol alternatives
- Vinegar extracts. Cider vinegar at the same ratios. Extracts minerals and some constituents well, resins and alkaloids poorly. Shelf life around a year. Suitable where alcohol is not.
- Glycerites, using vegetable glycerine, usually at 60 to 80% glycerine with water. Sweet, alcohol free, suitable for children where a preparation is appropriate at all. Shelf life 1 to 2 years, shorter than alcohol.
- Infused honey. Pleasant, mild, and note honey must never be given to a child under one because of the botulism spore risk.
- Teas and infusions, which the remedies chapter already covers, and which are the right preparation for most household use anyway. They keep for a day, not a decade, and that is often fine.
In a long emergency the case for tinctures is preservation: a summer's herbs held for years in a bottle rather than lost. That is a genuine benefit and it is worth being clear-eyed that the contents remain what the iron rules say they are.