Alcohol is the heart of tincturing – a tincture is a herb prepared in alcohol, afterall.
It is important to get a grasp of alcohol because, as a kitchen herbalist, if you’ve reached our tincturing page, you’ll probably be using a lot of it.
The alcohol we use in kitchen herbalism is Ethanol, which is made from fermented plant sugars. The fermentation is done by that most ubiquitous little fungus, yeast. In digesting the sugars, yeast produce alcohol. The alcohol is then separated from the water and other possible contaminants in a process called ‘distillation’.
Most commercially available alcohol is made from sugar cane waste. Most home -made alcohol ia made from grain.
There are other forms of alcohol – Methanol (NEVER USE METHANOL!) and Isopropyl Alcohol which is only used to make linaments for EXTERNAL USE. Sorry about all the bold caps, but those points are important. Never use those alcohols internally.
Denatured?
Denatured Ethanol is high concentration Ethanol that has had another chemical added to make it bitter and undrinkable. It is generally an artificial chemical that is added in a very small percentage, the most common is called ‘Bitrex‘ and has been named ‘the world’s bitterest substance’! More dangerously though some alcohols are denatured with Methanol, which is very toxic. Dangerous.
Even your ‘Bio-Ethanols’ have a bittering agent added because, folks being folks, there’s always someone who is stupid enough to try to drink 95% Ethanol!
Methanol is down right toxic but does Bitrex affect our remedies? I’ve not found it to. We are generally diluting 95% alcohol to 40%, then ingesting that at a rate of a teaspoonful to a cup of water, so it’s very dilute. You can still taste it but as many herbs are bitter anyway the taste can be masked.
Commercial alcohols with Bitrex added can be readily used in the intermediate alcohol stage of making herb infused oils if you choose to use that technique. In this case, the Bitrex isn’t being ingested because the oil is used externally.
The real difference between denatured and undenatured can be seen our bank accounts. The last batch of 20 litres of Bioethanol (denatured) cost me $95, undenatured Ethanol costs over $300 for the same amount. That’s before start slapping ‘organic’ labels on everything. (I’ve seen 500ml of ‘organic, undenatured ethanol going for $149!!!). For smaller amounts, you’re better buying Vodka when it’s on sale.
If in any doubt, stick to Vodka, purchase your alcohol from a local distiller or purchase your own still. If you’re daunted by the idea of distilling yourself, purchase an Airstill which will take a lot of the headaches out of the process while still prducing decent alcohol at a high concentration.
Strength – Percentage and Proof
Percentage and Proof are two ways to express the strength of alcohol. Alcohol strength is, in turn, an expression of the amount of alcohol in the liquid and the amount of water. Both will add to 100, so 40% alcohol has 40% alcohol and 60% water in it. Most ‘recreational’ alcohol is between 40% and 80% in strength. You can get alcohol that is 95% from some solvent suppliers. The US is lucky, they have a grain alcohol called ‘Everclear’ that is up to 95% alcohol and available pretty well everywhere (just like their guns).
Proof is an older term to express whether the alcohol is strong enough for use. Proof is simply double the percentage. 80 Proof alcohol is 40% alcohol and 60% water.
An old way of telling if an alcohol was ‘proof’ was to make a little pile of gunpowder and wet it with the alcohol to be tested. Then a match was applied and if the gunpowder burned well, it was ‘proof’.
Which alcohol to use?
With so many brands of alcohol and alcoholic beverages around, it can be a little confusing to someone new to tincturing. But here’s help!
Most tinctures are made with alcohol that is at around the 40% mark. That means that you can easily get it at any bottleshop, assuming that you are over 18. Generally, plain Vodka is best as it is less likely to have flavouring or additives. You can use that straight out of the bottle.
Buying alcohol from bottle shops is expensive so other sources are around. Solvent manufacturers and craft shops can supply 95% alcohol (more on this later). Warehouse grocers can get flavoured essences that are about 70% alcohol.
Buy the most strongest alcohol that you can afford. The reason for this is that it’s easy to dilute it to the concentration that you want.
Stronger concentrations of alcohol break down plant cell walls better, providing better extraction. This is especially true when tincturing Fungi.
Diluting alcohol (reducing the %)
As mentioned above, the concentration of the alcohol that you buy is an expression of how much alcohol is in your liquid and how much water, therefore it is easy to reduce the percentage by adding water. This method works on any percentage that you want to dilute. It is very hard to INCREASE the concentration of alcohol in a kitchen unless you have one of those small, stovetop stills, a commercial freezer or access to material that is a molecular seive. In other words, don’t worry about it.
For kitchen herbalists, especially beginners, most of the information on this page can be ignored. Simple proportions can be worked out to dilute strong alcohol to a lower concentration. Round everything to the nearest number and you’ll take a lot of the confusion out of things. If you’re happy making folk tinctures by eyeballing amounts, you can safely ignore the rest of this page.
For the more adventurous and curious among you …
Warning! Maths!
The ‘parts’ method – one way to explain it
Honestly, The maths isn’t that complicated. Trust me 😉
This is the easiest method of calculating how much water to add in order to dilute one strength of alcohol into another concentration. This method ignores volume (the amount of liquid you are using or end up with.
Alcohol is referred to by its percentage. That is, how much alcohol is in the solution. The rest is water.
Suppose that we want to reduce 50% acohol content to 35%.
Lets try it with Vodka (how many times have I heard that in my life?) as our solvent.
Step 1: rethink 50% as 50 parts and 35% as 35 parts.
Step 2: subtract 35 from 50. 50-35=15
Step 3: Measure out 15 parts of 50% Vodka and add 35 parts of water.
To check, the final number of parts will equal the strongest alcohol percentage that you started with. 15+35=50!
In summary – We have 50% Vodka and need 35% strength alcohol to tincture our herbs. We subtract 35 from 50 (it’s 15 😁). Measure out 35 parts of alcohol and add 15 parts of water. 35 + 15 = the original 50!
Another way to think about the parts method…
We need to dilute 60% alcohol to 40%.
60% alcohol contains 60% alcohol and 40% water (the two should always equal 100%).
We need our mix of 60 parts alcohol and 40 parts water to be reduced to 40 parts alcohol and 60 parts of water.
To make the 40 parts of water into 60 parts, we need to add 20 parts of water.
A better method to find how much water to add to get the desired %
A more mathematical method to calculate how much water you need to add to reduce the alcohol percentage uses the following formula –
((original % / target %)-1) x the original amount of spirits
It’s not as tricky as it looks. Let’s say we have 500 ml of 50% alcohol but want to know how much water we need to add to reach 40% and what the total volume will be.
Step 1: divide the original (strong) alcohol by the weak alcohol concentration. (50% / 40%) = 1.25
Step 2: subtract 1 from the result to get a decimal value 1.25 – 1 = 0.25
Step 3: multiply the result by the volume of the original (strong) alcohol 0.25 x 500ml = 125ml
This tells us that we must add 125 ml of water to reduce the strength to 40%.
Then to know much 40% alcohol we end up with –
Step 4: add the final result to the original amount of strong alcohol to find the total volume that you will end up with. 500 ml + 125 ml= 625ml.
To summarize: to dilute 500 ml of 50% alcohol to 40 % we must add (0.25 x 500) = 125 ml of water and we end up with a total of 625 ml
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To work out how much alcohol and water to use to make a known quantity of finished alcohol at a desited concentration
To do this, divide the target% by the original % and multiply by the desired volume. If you look, it’s kind of the reverse of the previous equation.
(target %/original%) x final volume
To make 500 ml of 40 % alcohol using 50% alcohol and water,
Step 1: divide the target concentration by the original (strong) alcohol concentration (40/50) x 500 =0.8
Step 2: multiply the result by the final volume of alcohol 0.8 x 500 = 400ml of alcohol
The amount of water is just (target total) – alcohol needed
Step 3: subtract the alcohol needed (from the last step) from the total volume 500 – 400 = 100ml of water
You need to combine 400 ml of 50% alcohol and 100 ml water to get 500 ml of 40% alcohol
What if you combine two alcohols?
There is a formula for that too! People love to drink, so there’s been lots of research on alcohol mixes (i.e cocktails)!
This is also the formula to use for calculating what you get when adding water or the results of the second stage of a double extraction. In the second set of parentheses, the volume is still the volume of the water but the alcohol % is 0. Once you get used to using this formula, you won’t need to worry about the others I’ve detailed. This is the ‘one ring to rule them all’.
The formula looks a little scary when you write it down but it’s not that hard.
(((alcohol % x volume) + (alcohol % x volume)) / total volume) and round to the nearest 2 decimal places.
All those brackets look pretty fearocious but its just to make sure that we do evrything in the right order. Once you get the hang of this, you can combine several bottles of alcohol and work out the volume and percentage.
Here’s an example. We’ve run out of water and only have two bottles of alcohol of differing percentages (lucky us). What happens if we try to dilute one with the other.
Suppose that we have 300 ml of 50% and 225 ml of 70%. What will we get by combining the two?
Step 1: for each alcohol, multiply the concentration by the volume. Put each calculation into brackets to make it all easier to keep track of.
(50 x 300) (70 x 225) which is (1500) and (15750)
Step 2: add both values together 15000 + 15750 = 30,750 It looks like a big number, but don’t worry, it’s only for the calculation.
Step 3: Add the two alcohol volumes together (300 + 225) = 525.
Step 4: Divide the result of step 2 by the result of step 3 and round it up or down to the level of accuracy you like (here, it’s 2 decimal places). (30750/525)= 58.57
For our, kitchen herbalism, purposes, you can ignore the decimals, they’ll only make a maximum difference of 1%.
So the answer is 58.67% alcohol. We have a total of 525 ml of 58.57% alcohol or close enough to 59% (which I’d use as 60% – these tiny % differences are easily ignored).
Once you get used to it, you can play around with the volumes to target the amount of alcohol you want.
Where’s a (tiny, tiny, part) of my alcohol going?
If you are fanatically precise and use exact excruciatingly accurate measurements of your alcohols when you mix them, you may find small inconsistencies in the final volume when compared to calculations. This is not because of evaporation or even someone taking sly little sips of your grog, it’s because of a phenomenon called ‘volume contraction’ where the alcohol molecules, literally, slide in between the water molecules, taking up less space.
Don’t worry about this at our stage of things. It’s a confusing, temperature dependent thing. At 20°C, for the 1.9 litres of brew in the example above, it works out to 9 ml (or 0.47% of the total).
The maths is horrible and relies a lot on tables (like the old log tables that we oldies used before calculators became a thing 😉). My tip – don’t worry about it. Some online calculators and apps have an option to factor it in but more don’t than do. You can see why…
Super advanced stuff.
…but there’s water already in the herb!
When you get pretty good at tincturing, you may ask yourself ‘but what about the moisture in the herb? Does that affect the concentration’? Give yourself a pat on the back! You’ve reached Herbal Jedi level!
There’s a whole page on that right here.
I’m working on a downloadable pdf of all of these calculations, with fully worked examples. It’ll be ready and linked to soon.
Other herb pages on Ligaya Garden
We cover a lot of ground on many herb related topics here on our website. There are whole pages devoted to different topics as well as frequent posts. Some of the links are –
