Have you ever wanted to make your own edibles, only to be turned off by equipment-heavy recipes, pungent aromas taking over your house, or the tedious delay in effects? If so, cannabis tincture recipes might be the game-changer you’ve been looking for.
Unlike the traditional edible procedure of infusing your cannabis into a fat and then incorporating it into a dish, tinctures are an alcoholic extraction where patience is a greater virtue than technique. This patience, in turn, rewards us with a product that’s portable, precise, and potent.
Cannabis tinctures can be traced back as one of the earliest forms of cannabis consumption. Generally, it involves soaking your decarbed cannabis in a sealed jar containing 80-proof or higher alcohol (although non-alcoholic methods are possible). Once your cannabis is fully extracted in the solution, you are able to dose it sublingually for a faster absorption than edibles. Alternatively, you can add your tincture directly to ingredients to infuse them, skipping the necessity for a fat to be involved at all.
Plunge into the ancient world of cannabis tinctures with these two simple cannabis tincture recipes, as well as some inspiration for how you can apply them in your cooking.
Rum tincture recipe
- 1 cup of dark rum
- 3.5g of decarboxylated cannabis (1/8oz)
To get started with this cannabis tincture recipe, simply place your decarbed cannabis into a sealable jar. Tighten, shake, and wait. After 24 hours of extracting in a dark place (to protect the cannabinoids from degrading), pass the tincture through a fine-mesh strainer. You can dose this tincture under your tongue using a dropper or learn how to turn it into your own CBD vanilla extract below. Although we opted for a high CBD strain in this recipe, feel free to incorporate your preferred strain of cannabis.
Using a strain with 11% CBD and 7% THC, this tincture ended up containing 271 mg and 173 mg respectively. For those using this as a tincture, each milliliter will contain 1.15 mg of CBD and 0.73 mg of THC.
CBD vanilla extract
- 1 cup of CBD-rum tincture
- 5-6 vanilla beans, cut in half
What’s great about using a high-proof alcohol is that it is really efficient in extracting any plant matter into it. To turn the rum tincture into CBD vanilla extract, throw your chopped vanilla beans into the same jar as your tincture. Again, patience is key here. Around 30 days later and you’ll be able to easily add CBD into any baked good calling for vanilla extract.
This delicious vanilla extract will contain around 15.4mg of CBD and 3.46mg of THC per teaspoon.
Gin tincture recipe
- 1 cup of gin
- 3.5g of decarboxylated cannabis (1/8oz)
Identical to the rum tincture process, add your preferred decarbed cannabis strain into a sealable jar with the gin. We used a high THC strain in this tincture in order to make the THC sugar that you’ll find below. Waiting 24 hours for the cannabinoids to be extracted, strain the tincture’s sediment through your sieve. Feel free to skip the sugar step and simply dose the tincture sublingually with a dropper.
The potency of this tincture, using a 16% THC strain, comes out to 394mg of THC in the entire tincture. If you’re dosing by the milliliter, that’s around 1.6mg of THC per milliliter.
THC sugar
- 2 tablespoons of THC-gin tincture
- 2 cups of white sugar
Preheat your oven to 220°F, and place a sheet of parchment on a baking tray. In a medium mixing bowl, add the tincture and sugar. Whisk until the sugar is the consistency of wet sand. Place the mixture onto your baking tray, and spread it out flat. Bake the sugar for 30 minutes to evaporate the alcohol. The sugar will come out hardened in some places, simply pulse in a food processor or crush it in a food bag until it returns to its original consistency. As sugar is a very universal ingredient, store in a dry but handy place.
Two cups of this sugar has 48 mg of THC in it, making it easy to incorporate and dose properly without fear of going overboard. If you’d like to see how to calculate the potency of this recipe using your preferred strain of cannabis, check out our guide here.
Now you have two simple cannabis tincture recipes, what to do with them, and the science behind it all. Let us know down below what creative tincture creations you’ve come up with. As always, check out more recipes here, cheers!