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Making Pomegranate Peel Tincture

by | Feb 20, 2019 | Uncategorized

Sliced Pomegranate

EDIT: I get more questions sent to me about this post than any other I have ever written. To save some time for everyone, here are the details on how to make pomegranate tincture:
In tincture making, you can use either fresh or dried plant material. Which material you use determines your methods and ratios. If you use fresh peel, you might use a 1:2 herb:menstruum ratio (typical for fresh plant tinctures). Since I use dried/powdered peel, I use a 1:5 ratio (typical for dried preparations, though exceptions exist). For the liquid, I use 70% water and 30% alcohol (I use Everclear — this is actually 95% alcohol, not 100%. Many herbalists treat this as “close enough” to 100% for these purposes). Since pomegranate peel is ~70% water (but is now dried out), that’s the amount you want to add back in for your menstruum. So if you start with (for example) 20 ounces of dried pomegranate peel (by weight), you will want to add 100 ounces of liquid, and this liquid should be 30% (30 ounces) alcohol and 70% (70 ounces) water. Put it in a jar and let it sit for 2 weeks in a dark place (shaking daily). Strain it out (this is really the only difficult part unless you have a tincture press), bottle it up, and you’re good to go.

Pomegranate is a truly amazing fruit with many medicinal applications, but the peel has unique applications that especially interest me, given my focus on gastrointestinal dysbiosis. The peel has incredibly potent antimicrobial effects, with an extremely broad range of action against multiple pathogens, including (but not limited to):

Blastocystis, Cryptosporidium, Giardia, Trichomonas, Tapeworm, Entamoeba histolytica, Streptococcus, E. coli, Enterococcus, Clostridium, Staphylococcus, Klebsiella, Shigella, Salmonella, Vibrio, Pseudomonas, H. pylori, and Candida.

Now, I never use a single botanical for pathogen eradication. I don’t think it works well and it isn’t reasonable in the context of dysbiosis to think that a single botanical can lower the microorganism threshold enough, broadly enough, to allow for beneficial commensal organisms to overgrow the targeted pathogen(s). This does sometimes occur and it has been documented with powerful and/or enhanced botanical extracts (some of which I use) but it is the exception to the rule, and it is generally best to use a multi-botanical approach.

That being said, pomegranate peel is both very powerful and very broad-spectrum and would possibly work better than some other options as a monotherapy. Personally, I still wouldn’t use it alone, but it would obviously make a great addition to a broader protocol.

Some of the antimicrobial research on pomegranate peel is in vitro, but there are also animal and human studies demonstrating pathogen eradication capabilities. Tincture extracts (both aqueous and ethanolic) work very well, but the problem is that pomegranate peel tincture is almost impossible to find here in the United States. So I decided to make my own.

Over the winter we ate a lot of pomegranates around here. And every time we ate one, I saved the peel in the freezer. Once I built up a good stash, I dehydrated them and ground them into a powder. I then added the appropriate amount of alcohol (Everclear is great for tincture-making) and water. It will be ready in about 2 weeks, and then I’ll have nearly a gallon of pomegranate peel tincture — a very rare remedy, indeed! If I were to purchase this amount from Australia (just about the only place you can find pomegranate peel tincture) it would have cost me at least $465.00 (not including shipping and handling). It was still not really cheap to make, but still a much better deal than importing it from another continent!

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Pomegranate peel after dehydration.

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Pomegranate peel after being powdered in the Vitamix. Everclear (95% ethanol) is standing by for the next step.

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Alcohol and water added to the powder. Ready in 2 weeks. Store out of the light and shake daily.

Learn to make your own medicine. At least for some things. It is empowering, satisfying, inexpensive, and just plain fun. Educate yourself and give it a try!