Tea tincture, and tinctures in general

To answer your questions:

In essence, yes that's it. The result you get will of course vary with the tea you start with among other variables.

Occasional shaking probably isn't enough - I generally shake my tinctures at least once a day - not an insignificant commitment over the course of a year or more. It won't hurt if you go away for a week now and then though, tincturing isn't that critical and is a distinctly inexact science.

Dark is certainly a good idea, cool is OK, warm probably better, cold not so much.

so:
1) Not ideal
2) No, minimal airspace is fine, with some tinctures a little air is helpful to the process anyway.
3) You could do, but then it will need very careful filtering afterwards - but try it by all means - the more finely powdered it is the faster the tincture will be ready to use. But it may also result in a slightly different scent.
4) Mainly space - a full jar of unpowdered tea is pretty full at 10% - remember it's done by weight and dry tea doesn't weigh much. If you are using other materials, dry them first or the water in the leaves / flowers / whatever ends up in the alcohol resulting in clouding problems when you use the tincture in your perfume.

What you're paying for when you buy a ready-made tincture isn't so much the raw-material but all that time, trouble and storage space that went into making it. Also if you want some today, you have to buy it, if you want some next year and you enjoy spending time playing about with tincturing then hang on to your money. . .

Tea's a favorite scent of mine too... awhile back, I took to making tea in my *big* stovetop cooking pot, then strain and repeat, I repeated about five times, just making that tea stronger and stronger... This process is called "folding".
So I made a 5X folded Black tea, then I boiled it and boiled and boiled, (lots of volatiles escaping all the while, smelled great!) and finally got to black goo in the bottom of the pot. It worked, and I use it. (but I may have also burned it...)

Another thought I had while reading this, is that alcohol *does* boil at a very low temp. And while this is def *NOT* recommended, I do it a lot. I put small bottles in the microwave filled with alcohol and something, and give it a five second burst. This heats up the alcohol really fast. I'f I'm using a half ounce bottle, I might get the alcohol to boil in 7 seconds. At which point that if you don't have a cap on it, then it will be all over the Microwave, instead of in your bottle.

BUT... you *could*, now mind you, this is purely conjecture, and don't try this at home, you could burn yourself, and I could never make a recommendation to personally do this extremely dangerous operation that could maim you for life if the bottle of alcohol explodes in your microwave, or worse on your hands and face scalding them for life..., I'd farm it out to the menehunes in Hawaii or somebody..., or do it in your enemies microwave... but put tea into alcohol with a plastic lid on the *clear* THICK glass jar, and boil the tea and alcohol tincture, using a mitt to pull the bottle out to agitate, or better yet, let it cool for half an hour IN the microwave... and ***DO NOT*** remove the lid till cool... Strain and repeat... You'll need to watch for the first bubbles through the window, and kill the power at the first sign of bubbles, so that the alcohol doesn't build up too much pressure inside the glass jar to make it explode.

This process certainly wouldn't take a year to complete, but could result in the loss of an eye or melted burnt skin if you mess it up... just sayin'

Hmm, <Yoda says> Chemistry experience have you?

Thanks for making me think of tinctures today. They just asphalt slurry sealed my street in front of me, so I just bottled up some asphalt slurry seal tincture in 200 proof alcohol, (because it was already wet, no need to add a lesser proof alcohol already containing more water...)

Do the tea leaves need to be changed? Or do you just let the original tea leaves sit for a year? I have been looking, off and on, for a black tea tincture or oil to buy. I've only found green tea which isn't what I want.

I have used a soxhlet extractor to make a tea extract with ethanol. I got something very similar to my nose to the tea absolute I purchased later. The exception is there seems to be a lot of minute particles in the extract I made and I have had a hard time filtering them out.

I tinctured green tea and peppermint and ithey seemed ready to use in a few days. Black tea powder is taking longer though... why 1 year? I feel like it would be usable soon...

I wouldn't change the leaves no, tea tinctures very slowly because most of the interesting things in it that make tea when you pour boiling water on it are water soluble more than ethanol soluble, so you'll go on extracting more from the same leaves for a long time. If you keep changing them the result will be different: you'll get a high concentration of the volatiles that come out quickly and nothing of the ones that take a long time.

If you want to buy some Black Tea tincture ready-made there is a link in the very first post in this thread.

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That will be because peppermint tinctures very quickly, so what you have after a few days is a peppermint tincture with traces of green tea. If you keep it for a year you'll have a green tea and peppermint tincture . . .

Black tea tincture colours after a few days, but don't be fooled into thinking that the colour and the volatiles come out of the leaves at the same speed. I've not tried it with powdered tea, that could well be significantly faster.

Thanks for the tip, Chris. I may try to tincture it myself just for fun.

Tinctures are great fun to make using all sorts of things. It is one of my favourite occupations. Mine are just done with patience, not direct heat.

By all means, please describe your process. I am very interested. Spring is coming and the lilacs will be in bloom. I'd like to try tincturing fresh lilacs. Do you have any experience with them?

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What is a molecular sieve? (This question is for Skelly. For some reason it attached to my reply to Mumsy).

Two cautions here: from a practical viewpoint tincturing flowers is difficult and only rarely successful, especially if they are fleshy and still fresh as in this case.

From a safety viewpoint you need to be very, very careful with Daphne as it extremely poisonous. The poison is absolutely deadly when ingested - I don't know whether alcohol might render it dangerous by skin contact as well - to be honest this isn't something I would tincture.

Oddly, whenever I load this page, it automatically forwards to Facebook, looking for something, but it only finds an error message...

That was, briefly, happening with pretty much every thread. It seems to have stopped now. Weird problem to have occurred though - makes me really glad I'm not in IT any more!

Sorry about the Daphne I knew because for years I've grown it in my garden and always had to worry about puppies chewing on the stems or visiting children eating the tempting looking red fruit. It was actually me that added that to the Wikipedia entry after I noticed it wasn't mentioned. There are a handful of deaths from Daphne poisoning each year round the world and all parts of the plant are known to be poisonous.

However all may not be lost for your freeze dried flowers: they would be safe enough used in a pot-pouri (out of reach of children, just in case) and would probably emit their scent for a good few weeks that way.

I like making tinctures of all sorts of herbs etc. DIY perfumery is just a hobby for me started from aromatherapy. I have homemade tinctures mostly vodka based from single herbs mostly. This season so far I made mugwort/yarrow tincture, a mineola tincture and a birch leaf tincture. When my fragrant rose blooms in the garden in summer I will be making rose tincture. Spices and resins I have also tinctures. Besides vodka some of the small liquour bottles of eau de vie are interesting to use also. I tincture just leaving things in bottles and wait.