How To Make Chaga Tincture
“He could not imagine any greater joy than to go away into the woods for months on end, to break off this chaga, crumble it, boil it up on a campfire, drink it and get well like an animal. To walk through the forest for months, to know no other care than to get better!”
Chaga mushroom growing on White Birch tree in Threshold Forest
What’s Chaga?
Among the many beings growing in Threshold Forest, one is very special. Chaga! Chaga is a species of fungus, Inonotus obliquus. It grows throughout the northern hemisphere wherever there are birch forests and grows almost exclusively on birch trees.
The Chaga fungus looks like lumps of burnt charcoal on the side of the tree. It isn’t like most mushrooms in which filaments of mycelium grow hidden in soil or behind bark and then fruit into the visible mushroom shapes we’re familiar with. Instead, what we see is a mass of mycelium known as a sclerotium. It is mostly black because it contains massive quantities of melanin. It usually grows somewhere between 2 and 10 metres above the ground on the tree, often at a spot where a branch has broken off leaving a wound which allows the fungal spores to infect the tree.
The Chaga infection is a parasite on the tree, not a symbiosis, but grows very slowly and may last on the living tree for up to 80 years. It does infect the heart wood of the tree though and it does eventually kill it. Chaga can only be foraged from living trees though. Since it is slow growing, and is not a fruiting body but the main mycelium, it is important to take no more than half of the Chaga from a particular growth site on a particular tree when foraging.
What Makes Chaga so Great?
In addition to melanin, Chaga also contains numerous other nutritious compounds. For this reason, it is known as the “king of medicinal mushrooms.” You may read from some sources that Chaga is an adaptogen that helps with stress. While many of the nutrients in Chaga have important benefits including connections to physiological systems that play a role in human stress response, there is some controversy regarding this term, and it is accepted in some professions but not others. Regardless, there is widespread scientific evidence confirming the presence of several beneficial compounds in chaga.
Chaga contains several classes of important antioxidant compounds including polysaccharides such as galactose, xylulose and mannose, polyphenols including gallic acid, triterpenes including inotodiol - which has recently been identified as an effective and safe treatment to improve symptoms of food allergy - and phytosterols including betulin and betulinic acid which are known for anticancer activity.
According to Medical News Today, Chaga has several major potential health benefits:
Chaga is a nutrient-dense superfood, containing many important vitamins and minerals.
Chaga may help slow the aging process in skin by reducing the oxidative stress that causes wrinkles and sagging.
Chaga may lower cholesterol and the so-called “bad” cholesterol; low-density lipoprotein (LDL).
Chaga is rich in antioxidants (as listed above) and studies have found that it can slow the growth of lung, breast and cervical cancer and can cause tumor cells to self-destruct while not harming health cells.
Chaga may play a role in reducing blood pressure and supporting improved cardiovascular health.
Chaga may help regulate the production of cytokines, the immune system’s chemical messengers, and thereby improve immune system functioning for a variety of infection-fighting benefits.
Chaga may help fight inflammation thanks to its role with cytokines which may also help fight autoimmune conditions and possibly some other diseases.
Chaga may help fight diabetes by reducing blood sugar, though more research on humans is needed.
Because of it potential effectiveness in treating cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, autoimmunity and other diseases, Chaga may lead to reduced use of other drugs and thereby prevent various harmful drug side effects.
Foraging Chaga
Whatever the exact nature of the benefits, we are lucky to have Chaga growing on White Birch trees in Threshold Forest. Foraging Chaga is not too difficult - you just lean a ladder against the tree, climb up and use a small pruning saw to cut off a piece about the size of a grapefruit. As mentioned earlier, it is important to take no more than half of any particular Chaga site on any particular tree to ensure that the mycelium remains healthy since it is so slow-growing. It’s also best to forage Chaga in the late fall or during the winter as when the birch trees become dormant, the Chaga holds the peak amount of nutrients. By late fall it’s also easier to get around in the forest and easier to see and spot Chaga growing on trees when deciduous foliage is down.
Since moving to Threshold Forest in May 2020, we identified several trees hosting Chaga infections. Learning more about the benefits of consuming Chaga extracts got me excited about the potential of foraging this gift from the land. As I described briefly above, the process of foraging for consumption starts with collecting pieces of Chaga about the size of a tennis ball or grapefruit. However, Chaga is not consumed directly like other mushrooms - instead, it is further processed to extract the nutrients. I foraged 6 pieces averaging about the size of a grapefruit on December 11, 2020.
Large Chaga chunks after foraging and before any processing
Initial Chaga Preparation
Once foraged, the larger chunks should be grated to remove most of the black crust. Then, the big chunks can be chopped into pieces about the size of a golf ball to prepare for further processing.
Smaller Chaga chunks, most of external black crust removed, large chunks chopped into golf ball sized pieces
These smaller chunks are then processed into granules about 2-5mm in diameter, often referred to as nuggets. The nuggets can be further ground into a powder for the fastest way of making simple tea but even just with nuggets, you can steep them in hot water for about 2 hours to make a delicious tea. It takes a long time because fungi are like animals and unlike plants they have a tough material in their cell walls - chitin - which is what animals use to make fingernails, claws and horns. Furthermore, some of the nutrients, notably the phytosterols such as betulin, are not water soluble. So, to get the most nutritional benefit, Chaga should be processed beyond simply steeping nuggets or powder for tea.
Extracting Nutrients from Chaga
There are three main ways to extract the beneficial nutrients from Chaga:
Using hot / boiling water to make decoctions,
Using ethanol to make tincture, and
Using fermentation agents.
Fermentation methods use a variety of agents and processes and produces unpredictable yields and can also become contaminated causing batches to be unusable. Hot water alone does not extract compounds that are not water soluble.
Chaga Tincture - Double Extraction Method
For these reasons I, like many, decided to use a combination of hot water and ethanol extraction to make tincture. The process involves 8 weeks in alcohol, followed by 3 daily hot water decoctions. Here are the steps to follow.
Phase 1 - Alcohol Extraction ( 8 weeks )
Prepare your chaga into small granules as described above.
Fill a large, clamp seal jar with the chaga nuggets/powder to within about 5cm of the top.
Pour alcohol (cane alcohol, grain alcohol or vodka) as close to the top as possible so that the jar can still be sealed.
Place the jar in an area that is dark and not too hot but still easily accessible. Every day for 8 weeks shake the jar thoroughly to ensure that the most chaga surface area remains in contact with alcohol and doesn’t settle.
At the end of 8 weeks, prepare a measuring cup, bowl, sealable glass jar or other suitable container that is at least twice the volume of alcohol. If you have a sealable glass jar of this size, you will also be able to add the water from Phase 2 so that you can have a single container for all the tincture you make. If you will be bottling the tincture in a number of smaller bottles, the container doesn’t need to be a sealable jar.
Using a large metal sieve with a fine mesh, strain the alcohol into the container. Set this alcohol aside for the 3 days of hot water extraction as you will add it back to the concentrated water decoction once it is completed.
Phase 2 - Hot Water Extraction ( Once daily for 3 days )
Transfer the chaga granules to a stainless steel pot that is more than twice the volume of the chaga.
Add an amount of water to the stainless steel pot with the chaga equal to the volume of alcohol you set aside in step 1. This will more than cover the chaga as the alcohol had done in the jar.
Use a bamboo skewer or a wooden chopstick and a knife to mark the depth of water in the pot. Keep this marked stick to use as a guide for evaporating the water.
Now add the same amount of water again, so that you have twice the volume of water in the pot as you had alcohol in Phase 1.
Bring the chaga and water to a boil in the pot and then reduce the heat and simmer. Do not cover, you want the water to evaporate slowly and steadily while simmering.
Monitor the water level as it evaporates while simmering by using the marked stick. When enough water has evaporated and the level has dropped back to the original level, turn off the heat and cover the pot to let it cool until the next day.
On days 2 and 3, repeat steps 4 to 6. This makes up the total of three decoctions.
Being careful to keep the chaga granules in the pot, carefully pour the cooled water into the container with the alcohol from Phase 1.
Finally, using cheesecloth ( you may need several pieces depending on how large a batch you are making ) strain the water from the chaga granules into the container as well. Strain an amount of chaga granules about the volume of a grapefruit each time and squeeze as much water out of it as you can.
Now you have the final tincture in the container, a mixture of the alcohol and water from the two extraction phases.
The alcohol phase ended for me on February 5th, 2021. After the 3 daily decoctions in boiling water, the process ends with a volume of tincture about equal in volume to the Chaga used in the beginning; which, in my case, was about 3 liters of tincture on February 8th, 2021.
The nutrients extracted from the Chaga into the tincture are quite concentrated. Only 2 ml of tincture is needed for an 8 ounce cup of tea and this is all you need daily. I usually add a pinch of cinnamon and about 1/2 teaspoon of maple syrup - which is also made at Threshold Forest - but that’s a story for another day!
