Quick Sip: Tincture Talk
Bringing botanicals to the forefront one drop at a time
For this month’s COTM, I made a tincture for the first time. I’m not sure why I hadn’t done it before, but I think it’s because it felt foreboding and risky. It’s not. Right after I was sure the rosemary tincture had worked, I grabbed 2 other botanicals from my back yard and made 2 more: orange blossom and hibiscus flower. Both are great, and I’m mad I haven’t done this sooner.
Tincture Basics
You can read a lot about some very involved tincture-making, and I’m sure many of those methods yield excellent results. But the basics are super-simple: grab a flavor you want to add to your drink, add the highest-proof grain alcohol you can find, and let it all sit together in a dark place for ~72-100 hours.
That’s it. A tincture is just something else suspended in another liquid (in this case, alcohol). You can experiment with different ratios, but I’ve found that a handful of botanical and a half cup of spirit tends to do the trick.
What you’re left with is a high-proof, high-potency ingredient that can add the essence of the flavor to a drink (or anything else) without needing to be carefully-managed. A little goes a long, long way.
Tinctures vs Bitters
If that all sounds a lot like a simple bottle of bitters to you, you’d be right. Tinctures can have a wider range of flavor profiles since there’s no “bitter” brand to maintain, and they’re almost always single-ingredient so the profile is also more concentrated. I think of bitters as a bunch of tinctures mixed together to create something more complex than you can get with any single ingredient.
But, in terms of how they act in a cocktail, there’s really not much difference. A dash of bitters and a dropper of tincture are going to modify a drink in the same way, it’s just a matter of what flavor you’re adding.
Bonus: tinctures are cheaper if you have the ingredients around anyway. It’s a great use for an herb garden.
I’ll share some quick recipes with my other tinctures next week!