✦ HOW TO USE THEM ✦
Cold Extract
A cold extract is the patient extraction of a plant's most delicate chemistry. By steeping its softer parts — leaves, blossoms, and tender aerial tops — in cold water over many hours, you draw out the fragile, heat-sensitive constituents that a simmer would destroy.
Combine plant and cold water
Use soft, delicate parts — fresh leaves, blossoms, soft aerial tops. Cover them with cold, filtered or spring water in a glass jar so chlorine and heat don't blunt the plant's lighter chemistry.
Rest in the cool
Set the jar in the refrigerator or a cool, dark place for eight to twelve hours — overnight is ideal. Time, not heat, draws the constituents out, and the cold keeps the fragile ones intact.
Strain and keep
Pour through cloth or a fine mesh and press the plant lightly. The liquor that runs through holds the volatile and heat-sensitive compounds a decoction would have driven off.
What stays
The lightest, most fragile compounds survive the cold steep and stay in the liquor — the delicate floral esters, the monoterpenes that carry a plant's top-note fragrance, heat-sensitive vitamin C and several of the B vitamins, the living enzymes, and the water-soluble flavonoids. What you keep is a bright, aromatic, volatile-rich liquor carrying the plant's most ephemeral chemistry.
What's left behind
The heavy structural backbone of the plant stays locked in the tissue — the dense tannins, complex polyphenols, minerals, mucilage, and polysaccharides. Without heat to draw them out, these remain in the strained leaves rather than the liquor.