✦ HOW TO USE THEM ✦
Decoct
A decoction is the slow extraction of a plant's most durable chemistry. By simmering its tougher parts — roots, bark, seeds, and dense leaves — in water over sustained heat, you draw out the deep, heat-stable constituents that a quick steep would leave behind.
Bring water to a rolling boil
Use a non-reactive pot — enamel, glass, or stainless steel. Start with cold, filtered or spring water so chlorine doesn't suppress the plant's chemistry.
Add the plant material
Drop in chopped roots, broken bark, seeds, or dense leaves. Tougher, woody parts release their constituents slowly and reward the long simmer.
Cover and simmer
Reduce to a gentle simmer, lid on, for fifteen to forty-five minutes. The lid traps the steam and keeps the water level steady while heat does the extracting.
What cooks off
The lightest, most volatile compounds rise with the steam and leave the pot — the delicate floral esters, the monoterpenes that give a plant its top-note fragrance, heat-sensitive vitamins like vitamin C and several of the B vitamins, and the living enzymes. Once evaporated, these are gone from the liquor.
What remains
The heavier, heat-stable backbone of the plant is drawn into the water and stays there — the tannins, complex polyphenols, bitter glycosides, alkaloids, minerals, mucilage, and dense polysaccharides. What you keep is a dark, astringent, mineral-rich liquor carrying the structural and medicinal core of the plant.