What do you do on a rainy day?

May 27, 2021

Well, you test your tincture on beard lichen (Usnea filipendula).

We picked the beard lichen a couple of months ago. It was a bit cloudy and quiet in the forest. We had already chosen the place. In the forests of Östergötland at my mother-in-law's where it is quiet and lonely. We never see a living person when we are out in the forests there. And the beard lichen grows abundantly. It swayed slowly in the wind and gave a feeling of calm but also desolation.

To be sure it was beard lichen, we did the rubber band trick. Beard lichen has an elastic thread that you can feel if you carefully grab the ends and pull lightly.

To make the tincture, we chose to follow the advice of herbalist Stephen Buhner. He has written the fantastic book "Herbal Antibiotics" (1999) where he discusses plants of the future such as beard lichen, berberines such as Mahonia, wormwood, etc.

We dried the beard lichen and ground it in the blender to a powder. The inner, elastic thread is white while the outer shell is green. We had to blend for quite a while, so beard lichen is quite durable, it turned out.

Buhner's recommendation is to make a tincture in two steps. First, you make a water bath, to use the heat to extract the water-soluble polysaccharides found in the inner, white threads. Then you add the alcohol, which has the capacity to extract other substances such as "usnic acid", which is found in the outer shell.

We used a ration of 1:5, one part beard lichen and 5 parts liquid. The liquid was divided equally between water and alcohol. The alcohol we used was 50%.

Now our tincture has been standing for 6 weeks and we have strained it and it is ready for use.

P.S. The herbal factory's tinctures are produced by our awesome growers; but for our own use we make some of our own tinctures, such as this one from beard lichen.