Urban Homestead: Making Cannabis Tinctures at Home

Making a Cannabis tea at home is one of the most reliable, covert, medicinal ways to consume cannabis. Tinctures offer an opportunity to explore the alchemic purposes of the compounds and physical parts of the Sativa flower. Breaking down the walls of the cannabis plant to access the soluble compounds, priming them for bioaccessibility, takes little effort to achieve high reward. Tinctures are great for travel, contexts where stigma is overwhelming, and is a simple way to get more acquainted with the biology of this beloved plant.

There are many scientific peer-reviewed articles that have validated the medicinal properties present in cannabis tinctures, as each compound is separated and brought back together in a type of communion to remember the many potential mediums for cannabis to enrich and uplift the human species.

What You Need

DIY items, equipment list:

• Oven, Instant Pot, or herb vaporizer
• 3.5 grams of your favorite sticky icky strain or the stems
• Average sized glass mason jars
• Proofed grain alcohol
• A clean, sanitized space

How to Prepare a Tincture

Tincture making has been a staple in many cultures the world over as simple medicine technologies that allow for extraction from other living forms of life that have biological benefits. Tinctures can be made from all plants that are edible, through either hot water extraction or alcohol extraction. For the sake of the compounds in the cannabis plant, to make them bioavailable, the compounds need to be temporarily housed (soaked) in a mason jar after being decarboxylated to trigger the THC activation.

Here are the instructions to follow.

1. Introduce 3.5 grams ground flower or whole flower stems into your herb vaporizer. If using stems, please do not smoke from the vaporizer, only use the head to decarboxylate the stems to activate the THC compounds through heat. If using ground flower in your vaporizer, consume the herb through smoking as typical. If you do not have a vaporizer, you can use an oven or an instant pot on average heat for 30 minutes to decarb the flower. Keep an eye on it, as the plant life should appear brown after decarb. Don’t let it burn and become too discolored or else your tincture will not be effective.
2. After a few minutes in the vaporizer chamber, the plant life will smell a bit ‘cooked’ and singed. This is a normal experience and a necessary step in making a cannabis tincture.
3. The decarboxylated cannabis can be removed from the vaporizer chamber and emptied into a mason jar on a clean, level surface. Put the top back on the jar. If the cannabis plant/stems were decarboxylated by being previously emptied into a mason jar and put in the oven, you can skip this step because the good terps from the sticky icky are all in that jar–an upside of using an oven.
4. 3.5 grams of flower/stems will take up half of an average size mason jar (not the tiny ones, not the XXL ones).
5. Pour grain alcohol, 40 proof or more, over the flower until the liquid is about 1.5 inches above the solid ground flower or stems. The higher alcohol proof you can find, the better for extracting the compounds and maintaining their potency. Put the top back on the jar.
6. The jar will need to sit for a few weeks, at least 2, at the most 6, for maximum bio-benefit and to extract all alcohol-soluble compounds from the process. Depending on how high proof, the longer/shorter the jar should sit. Do not shake the jar, as trichomes are sensitive and shaking the jar will bulk up your tincture with more plant matter than you’d like for a psychoactive tincture.
7. After a few weeks, your tincture will be ready to strain. To do this, remove the lid of the mason jar, replace the space where the lid was with unbleached cheesecloth. Tie a rubber band around the rim of the glass, securing the cheese cloth in place to the glass rim, taut. Turn the jar upside down over a container that is safe (glass or polypropylene plastic, PP5) and drain the liquid, separating the tincture from the more obvious plant matter. Cannabis tinctures are alcohol based and there is often an undertone of alcohol in the taste. If you’d like to evaporate some of the alcohol, leave the liquid sitting out over 24 hours to evaporate the alcohol by 30%.
8. Safely secure the drained liquid in a 1 oz or 2oz small amber-colored glass dropper bottle for best preservation. Keep in the pantry, a cool place.
9. Dose and Enjoy!

Making tinctures is a form of self-care and a way to customize the dosage of THC you consume throughout your day.