Seven-fold increase in yield from tincturing??

[Clayton Hynfield]

Hi, all! Brand new student here. I made up a couple of tinctures tonight, and figured I’d work out the relative yield between powder and tincture. I assumed that the process would be somewhat lossy, leaving some of the tincture behind because you simply can’t squeeze it all out at the end. I think I must be doing something wrong, because it looks like there’s a seven-fold increase in the yield going from powder to tincture.

Here’s my procedure and measurements. The last round of tinctures I made, I used 8 fl oz of vodka, and the strained result was about 6 fl oz, so it seems like I get about three-quarters of the solvent back as tincture. This time I wanted to produce 4 fl oz of tincture, so I used about 5⅓ fl oz of vodka. This weighed 140 g. With a ratio of 1:5 powder to solvent, I measured out 28 g of powder with a teaspoon, which took 14 tsp.

Here’s what I calculated. The dosing recommendation on the powders I’m using is 1–2 tsp. 14 tsp should therefore yield 7–14 doses of powder. The dosing recommendation on the tinctures I’m aiming to produce is ¼–½ tsp. There are 6 tsp in 1 fl oz, or 24 tsp in 4 fl oz, so 4 fl oz should therefore yield 48–96 doses of tincture, or nearly seven times as much as the powder that went into the tincture!

Here’s what I’m wondering: Is there then much less actual medicine in the tinctured 28 g of powder? Or is it somehow so much more available to the body in a tincture that the dosing needs to be much lower? Or have I somehow completely boogered my procedure or math?

I browsed this forum and searched and couldn’t find this discussed yet, but I’m not super-confident in my search skills yet.

Thanks very much for any advice you can share!

[Greg Boggs]

Hi Clayton and welcome to the school and forum! Your math checks out to me, but math has never been my strong suit haha. I do know that your body absorbs the tincture much more rapidly and efficiently than a powder, however not every herb keeps all of its medicinal benefits. When you take a tincture, Doc says your body will pretty much absorb it all before it even makes it to your stomach.

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Clayton Hynfield

[Dan Flowers]

Hey Clayton, you doing it correctly as I can see.  Think of tinctures as being very concentrated medicines hence many more doses available and more economical.  That’s why I use tinctures almost exclusively.  For interest look up online the Dalton 500 rule.  I don’t know for sure but have a good feeling that when powders are taken by stomach, much of the medicinal effects might be negated for a few different reasons.  Just my 2 cents 🙂

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Clayton Hynfield

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