Making Plant Extracts For Pipe Tobacco

[PressuredLeaf]

In the interest of improving my pipe tobacco blends, I have become much more interested in the use of casings. In my opinion, the key to good pipe tobacco is starting with good leaf. However, besides the leaf there are many options for changing the quality of the final smoke. Initially I avoided casing with anything besides water and honey because I felt like using any sort of additive was cheating. Although I still try to take a minimal additive approach, to me there is now doubt casing can greatly improve many of the qualitative aspects of a tobacco blend. My goal in casing is to enhance the qualities I like in various tobaccos, say the sweetness in flue cured or the aroma of latakia with out masking the natural tobacco characteristics. With this goal in mind I began researching and thinking about casing agents. My criteria for a casing material were/are :

1. A natural product (ideally from a plant)
2. Easily applied as a liquid
3. Easy to get

One of the first casing additives I became interested in was deer tongue which is said to smell of coumarin. Growing up I remember the smell of coumarin from sweet ferns in the woods of northern WI, and I new I had to get some. I purchased an ounce of dried deer tongue from amazon and the leaf I received smelled wonder full. The issue was the leaf was not something I would add to my tobacco in its natural form. So I decided extracting the plant would with a solvent would be ideal. I decided to use vodka as the extraction solvent since coumarin is very poorly soluble in water. Below are some pictures, and the process is very simple with applicability to many natural plant products. 10g of dried plant material is roughly broken up to expose a greater surface are for extraction, 50ml of vodka is added to cover all of the plant material. The material is covered to minimize evaporation and allowed to extract for at least 12 hours. The plant material is filtered off using a coffee filter, and the extract ~30ml is stored in small bottles in the fridge. Other extracts I am trying are

1. Licorice root extract ( not like the candy, the actual root)
2. Star Anise (this is actually what we associate with "licorice")
3. Sassafras bark
4. Vanilla


I find deer tongue extract in the amount of 1-3ml/2oz of tobacco greatly enhances woody/ sweet notes in the taste of the smoke w/o actually tasting the deer tongue. As for the aroma, both the room note and raw tobacco smell delicious with any amount of deer tongue extract.

Anyone else have any luck with casings?

 

[TigerTom]

There are a few plants I could find called deer tongue:

Trilisa odoratissima - a flowering plant from the Asteraceae family.

Dichanthelium clandestinum - a species of grass.

Hierochloe odorata - sweetgrass, which has a sweet odor due to coumarin content.

Asplenium scolopendrium - also called Hart's Tongue Fern.

Only Trilisa odoratissima has a history of use to flavor tobacco, at least that I could find reference to.

You sure the fern you collected is safe?

EDIT: Nevermind. Apparently I can't read because I completely missed the part where you said you purchased some from Amazon.

 

[deluxestogie]

Deerstongue that is blended with tobacco goes by two different Latin binomials:

• Carphephorus odoratissimus
• Trilisa odoratissima

Deer's tongue

Deer's tongue is a type of grass used in some pipe tobacco blends. There is a small jar of it at my local tobacconist. They might add a pinch of it to a pound of a blend. It has a coumarin type flavor to it, like sweetgrass. I tried to emulate this by putting zubrowka in some tobacco. It turned...

fairtradetobacco.com

Deer Tongue/Tonka Beans: Safety and Use

Over the past year I have become a big fan of adding Deer's Tongue (DT) to a few of my pipe blends. I am getting quite tired of reading about how dangerous it is so I thought I'd set the record straight. For most of this little article I will refer to DT and Tonka Beans (TB) collectively as...

fairtradetobacco.com

Bob

 

[TigerTom]

Interesting. Carphephorus didn't show up in my search for deer tongue, but when I searched for "Carphephorus odoratissimus" I got back a plant commonly called Vanillaleaf. Then I did some digging and found that some taxonomists lump Trilisa into Carnephorus, and some others consider them synonyms, and still others classify them completely separate.

Yay for consistency.

I'm curious how this will turn out.

 

[deluxestogie]

Latin binomials have been newly assigned to various plants by numerous botanists over the last several hundred years.

Bob

 

[GreenDragon]

Taxonomists (especially in Botany) can themselves be classified into a bimodal distribution: Lumpers and Splitters

 

[ChinaVoodoo]

Taxonomists (especially in Botany) can themselves be classified into a bimodal distribution: Lumpers and Splitters

Is this from Arora's Mushrooms Demystified?

I have grown Carphephorus odoratissimus. It was only slightly successful and I got about half an ounce, but it was incredible for flavouring tobacco compared to what I've had commercially. Overall, I'd say it was worth it.

 

[deluxestogie]

That's from late April (indoors) of 2015, and is as good as my deer tongue looked. Once transplanted outdoors, it slowly went away. It really wants a warm and humid, coastal wetland.

Bob

 

[ChinaVoodoo]

Mine lasted 9 or ten months, partly in a greenhouse over summer, and eventually died in the winter.

 

[MysticMapacho]

I recently made a licorice root extract with vodka. All I did was buy bulk licorice root pieces from a local health food store added about a cup of the root to 16oz of vodka and let it steep for a couple days. I then added the jar to a hot water bath for a few hours then strained it. Took the left over licorice root and decocted it in another 16oz of water for a couple of hours then strained that and added it to the licorice root vodka.
I’ve been casing both toasted burley and Virginia Red with this stuff and it’s been amazing.
I’ve also been adding essential oil of cacao to the licorice root tincture and that’s been taking it to a whole new level.

 

[PressuredLeaf]

I recently made a licorice root extract with vodka. All I did was buy bulk licorice root pieces from a local health food store added about a cup of the root to 16oz of vodka and let it steep for a couple days. I then added the jar to a hot water bath for a few hours then strained it. Took the left over licorice root and decocted it in another 16oz of water for a couple of hours then strained that and added it to the licorice root vodka.
I’ve been casing both toasted burley and Virginia Red with this stuff and it’s been amazing.
I’ve also been adding essential oil of cacao to the licorice root tincture and that’s been taking it to a whole new level.

Glad you like the licorice root extract too! What application rates (roughly) are you using for the licorice root extract and cacao?

I'm with you on the licorice root. I did a similar extraction with boiling water. I took 20g of root chunk and boil in a pint of water for 5 minutes, then filtered and boiled down to ~30ml. The resulting dark liquid has no "flavor" but an intense slowly building sweetness. For those of you who dont know , licorice root does not taste like licorice, it basically has no flavor. It does however contain a compound called Glycyrrhizin which naturally occurs in the root and is about 30-50x more sweet than table sugar. When added to tobacco the extract does not give a licorice flavor, rather it adds a smooth sweetness to the smoke at the right levels. If you want the traditional black licorice smell we all know, consider using Star Anise which contains Anethole in the essential oil (Anethole being responsible for the "black licorice" smell and flavor).


Also great work on the deer tongue plants everyone, but from my perspective its probably easier just to buy it. Although, that certainly doesn't give the satisfaction of using something you grew yourself.

 

[deluxestogie]

Just be aware of the toxicity issues related to glycyrrhizin: http://europepmc.org/backend/ptpmcrender.fcgi?accid=PMC3498851&blobtype=pdf

Bob

 

[PressuredLeaf]

Just be aware of the toxicity issues related to glycyrrhizin: http://europepmc.org/backend/ptpmcrender.fcgi?accid=PMC3498851&blobtype=pdf

Bob

Good point Bob,

For people who have some reservations about glycyrrhizin , the maximum daily dose is 100mg. Most root contains between 6-14% by weight, so the avg is about 10%. That puts the 100mg mark at about 1g of root (assuming 100% extraction) , which is enough to case quite a bit of tobacco. So, if you are only using it as a casing agent, you would have to smoke quite a bit of treated tobacco in one day to go over the 100mg mark. That being said, some people with pre-existing conditions may be more sensitive than others.

 

[MysticMapacho]

Glad you like the licorice root extract too! What application rates (roughly) are you using for the licorice root extract and cacao?

I'm with you on the licorice root. I did a similar extraction with boiling water. I took 20g of root chunk and boil in a pint of water for 5 minutes, then filtered and boiled down to ~30ml. The resulting dark liquid has no "flavor" but an intense slowly building sweetness. For those of you who dont know , licorice root does not taste like licorice, it basically has no flavor. It does however contain a compound called Glycyrrhizin which naturally occurs in the root and is about 30-50x more sweet than table sugar. When added to tobacco the extract does not give a licorice flavor, rather it adds a smooth sweetness to the smoke at the right levels. If you want the traditional black licorice smell we all know, consider using Star Anise which contains Anethole in the essential oil (Anethole being responsible for the "black licorice" smell and flavor).


Also great work on the deer tongue plants everyone, but from my perspective its probably easier just to buy it. Although, that certainly doesn't give the satisfaction of using something you grew yourself.

I add 15-20 drops of cacao essential oil to 6oz of the licorice tincture. It’s easy to overdo the cacao. It’s potent stuff. Before I case the tobacco I’ll pretty much dry it out completely in a warm oven. After the tobacco is dry and warm that’s when I spray it down as evenly as possible. I’ll then put it in a jar and allow it to sit a couple of days before smoking.

My next experiment is going to be with tonka essential oil. I’ve got some on order now. I’ll check back and let you know how this works out.

 

[PressuredLeaf]

Just a little update:

Of the extracts I have tried, the deer tongue is by far the most persistent in the final product. All of the others, sort of "disappear" into the final product. Deer tongue on the other hand, at a rate of 2-5% plant extract persists very well into the final product, and especially the room note. I smoked some in a VaPer with some MD609, and the room note reminded me very much of baked goods.