What is a tincture? What’s an infusion? What about essential oils or extracts?…

Let’s answer the easy questions, so you can weave through your herbal options like a pro

One of my favorite things about working with herbs is that they are whole, living organisms. In our current world of food packaging though, we often resort to checking ingredient labels because the object in hand no longer resembles a whole food, but has been transformed into a ‘product.’ And it gets a little crazy when we find the ingredient lists long enough to max out the character count in a Twitter post several times over! It’s not only our lack of food chemist vocabulary (or our ability to ready a 17-letter ingredient as it gets hyphenated over two lines) that gets strained by these tongue-twisters, but our bodies can also get confused when trying to process many unnatural, “food-like substances.”

So let’s get back to our roots—

Humans have been eating and using herbs for their health since, well, even before we have records thousands of years ago. Animals use herbs too, and just ‘naturally’ chew on plants that will help them feel better and get the nutrients they need. And for millennia, people have been tinkering with their food: harnessing fire and mastering pottery allowed us to boil water (and herbs!), figuring out fermentation allowed us to enjoy and utilize vinegars and alcohols (to extract and preserve herbs!), and pressing out fatty seeds and fruits into oils gave us access to high-quality fats and skin protecting salves (with herbs!)

See how easy that is? I just explained the main methods of herbal preparations without using a single herbalist term. Now that you know it’s just different combos of water, heat, alcohol, oil and vinegar, let’s hook them up with their proper definitions…

When we put an herb with water, we have a few choices:

• Herb in hot water, let it sit (steep) for a few minutes = herbal tea
• Herb in hot water, let it steep for 10 minutes to several hours = herbal infusion
• Herb in cold water, let it steep for several hours = cold herbal infusion
• Herb in boiling water, simmering for 20 minutes or more = herbal decoction

Herbs prepared in water only last a short while before bacteria and mold take over (up to a few days in the refrigerator typically). If we want herbs that last longer, we must look at other ways of preparing them.

Besides properly drying herbs (and keeping them away from moisture, heat and light) so that we can eat them later in food or capsules, we have some other options for high-potency, long-lasting herbs:

When we put an herb with other liquids, we have longer-preserved preparations:

• Herb in a mixture of alcohol and water, let it sit for days or weeks = herbal tincture (there it is!)
• Herb in vinegar, let it sit for days or a couple weeks = herbal vinegar (or acetract)
• Herb in honey, let it sit for days or weeks = herbal honey, (electuary—with powdered herbs)
• Herb in glycerin (a sugar alcohol), let it sit for days or weeks = herbal glycerite
• Herb in oil, let it sit for days or a couple weeks = herbal oil (sometimes called an oil infusion)

These preparations, if done properly, can last from about 6 months (vinegars and honeys), to a year or more (glycerites and herbal oils) to the long-lasting champion—herbal tinctures that last for several years to even a decade or more!

That leaves us with just a couple of odds-and-ends to clarify…

Essential oils, on the other hand, are very different than herbal oils:

• Herbal oils are just herbs (chopped or whole) put in oil and left to infuse their goodness into the surrounding oil
• Whereas an essential oil is a much more in-depth, intensive process of steam distillation, using specific distillery equipment and requiring a vast amount of plant material to be processed down to a very small dropper bottle of an ounce or two. Also, this captures only a small subset of the plant’s chemicals (mostly terpenes) that make it into the final product, and not the whole-herb phytochemical compounds (thousands of synergistic molecules that exist in each plant.)

An extract is kind of an informal term, and isn’t used much in the herbalist’s world, as you can ‘extract’ an herb in a liquid substance (or solvent), just as you could say you can ‘infuse’ an herb in water or oil.

But in some contexts, an extract means only a specific component of the plant has been removed. Sometimes you might hear ‘standardized herbal extract’—and what that means is that a specific component of the herb has been isolated into the preparation, and typically to a specific guaranteed percentage or measured amount. This is very different than a whole herb—with all its synergistic compounds (some not even scientifically isolated yet!) Additionally, plant compounds are variable from plant to plant and terrain to terrain, as well as many other factors.

I hope this has given you a ‘taste’ of the many beautifully simple ways of incorporating herbs into your life. Just like the culinary arts, you can prepare herbs in very simple ways or formulate them into amazingly complex and synergistic formulations and component extraction techniques. We’re happy to offer you the products of our years of tinkering with different extraction methods and perfecting our herbal formulas for your daily life.

I’ll be talking more in-depth about tinctures (what they do, what are their benefits, how do you take them), as well as other types of herbal preparations in future blogs, so make sure you’re on our mailing list for updates!

In the meantime, head on over to the shop to check out our tinctures, teas and more…

—Mia