Herbal Beverages & Aphrodisiacs: Botanical Beer, Mead, Wine, Cocktails & Sodas Paperback – February 4, 2024

Color VersionWe’re pleased to present for your information and enjoyment our first Plant Healer compilation of writings focused on herbal flavored and fortified drinks. Meads and wines begin with fermented fruit of course, and beers usually contain Hops, but our authors take the concept of botanical beverages so much further.The pages of Herbal Beverages & Aphrodisiacs are pulled directly from archived issues of the Plant Healer Quarterly magazine, with articles exploring the history and aesthetics of herbal beers, meads, wines, absinthe, mixed cocktails, and cannabis infused drinks…. as well as non-alcoholic root beers, tree beers and sodas –– how to ferment, brew, concoct, mix, serve, and better utilize and appreciate these aids and delights. And for a sweetener, we’ve included a few articles about herbal aphrodisiacs, appropriately enough given how often healed bodies and hearty drinks can lead to carnal pleasures! To be clear, whether ingesting an herb to ease a belly ache or sipping a sipping a fine beer after a long day of work, plants help us to feel better.We know that alcohol is commonly used to extract the medicinal components of certain plants for tinctures, and so it totally makes sense that we can get some specific health benefits from herbs used in the fermentation process or added later as infusions and more. Various primate species are known to be drawn to fermented fruits and seem to relish getting royally high on them, and they’ve also been shown to utilize herbs with known healing effects to treat their basic ailments. It’s certainly no stretch to think that humans have done the same from the very beginning: treasuring the plants that help heal our illnesses and wounds, while also savoring the exquisite tastes and enjoyable effects of plant-based drinks. And it makes sense that, as with so many things, there are some exceptional students and practitioners, aficionados and zealots who make a veritable art out of what are essentially the down-home crafts of healing, brewing, and mixology.Our authors are unquestionably artists in their own ways, from the folky humor of longtime Quarterly columnists Jereme “Yeti” Zimmerman and Carol Batey-Prunty to the incredibly knowledgable herbal clinician Christa Sinadinos and scholarly herbal historian Virginia Adi. Some, like Jereme, Emily Han and Susan Evans have entire books of their own available now on these subjects, while the endlessly creative Amanda Furbee puts her botanical bartending skills to use as a relaxing break from her many herbal enterprises and helping manage the Good Medicine Confluence (turn to the Bios page at the end of this book for the authors’ credits and how to contact them). We are honored to share and showcase our thirteen Plant Healer contributors to this compilation, and hope you will greatly benefit from their inspiring offerings as you experiment with new herbal concoctions and enjoy the fruits of your explorations.And to all of you, the wonderful readers, I raise a toast! Here’s lookin’ atcha….Salud! Skal! Cheers! And let’s not leave out aphrodisia –– Bottoms up! Read more