Answers on the unique properties of making an Amanita muscaria tincture. So what we're gonna do is make tincture! I hope to find vendors who make these and post them on the Where To Buy page so check that out! This is an altered transcript of a video so there may be references to video.
You'll want to watch the other video "About Making Amanita Tincture" first, about why it has to be made this way. Or find it here in our blog.
Technically it's not a tincture, it's the tea using alcohol as a preservative and condensed down so that you wind up with pretty much the same thing. Again, watch the other video on why that is. We're going to be using the tea recipe. If you don't know how to make the tea, go to the post on how to prepare Amanita muscaria. With this one, we're going to be using that tea recipe, but I'm going to be doing it differently because we need to reduce it down to make it more concentrated, so there's a bit of math that we have to do.
When we do the tea recipe, I show you these containers and I tell you to split it up into 4 containers to freeze it, so if we just do this without condensing it and pour it into this bottle... it's basically just the tea. No preservative, no alcohol, not reduced.
So why would we use a tincture? There is some controversy about it. First let me say, when I look at traditional use, using alcohol is a relatively new practice. It's not something that goes back thousands of years, and I'm pretty sure the reason people do it is that they got confused about other mushrooms and extrapolated it over to this one, but it doesn't work that way. All you have to do is make the tea.
So, what would you want to use it for? What I use the tincture for is when I'm traveling and won't have access to burners to boil the tea. If you're on the go a lot or don't have consistent access to the tools for making the tea, the tincture is a good thing to take in place of that, because it's basically the tea being preserved in alcohol and it can sit at room temperature.
So today what I'm going to be doing is using the tea recipe, but I'm going to reduce it down to 45ml total at the end. We always start with a full cup (about 235 ml) and then we boil it down to 45ml or 1/4 cup.
If you are harvesting and don't have a dehydrator, you can just go straight to boiling. The only reason we dehydrate them is to store them long-term.
I've laid out dry ones on top of the raw ones here, and I'm going to weigh these to get an idea of how many grams I'm looking at here in order to compare dry weight and wet weight.
We're taking one button, two small caps, two medium caps, and two larger caps, placing them in the water.
I put lemon in this because tequila and lemon make the tincture taste amazing and sweet. I don't like vodka, so I don't use it, but sometimes you have to. If I have a choice, I always use tequila (40% alcohol).
Now once the water level gets low, you'll want to turn down the heat to low and keep an eye on the evaporation.
This turned out really thick. Now, I'm going to take a very small amount of water to rinse over the mushrooms as I strain them into the cup.
Normally this would be a cup, and we'd put about 45ml in each of these small containers.
So since I've simmered it down, this cup should have about 45ml or 1/4 cup.
Now I'm going to fill this bottle the rest of the way up with tequila.
So I'd say that this is about 3 times stronger than the regular tea that I make.
So that is how you make a tincture! I hope I answered your questions and helped you out.