Fogle’s guide to making (a sort of) Laudanum
(A step by step pictorial)

Part 1

Introduction:
Real Laudanum was made with opium and many other ingredients. Among which were henbane, nutmeg and lots of others. My type of Laudanum is actually an alcoholic extract of concentrated poppy tea. That is why I wouldn’t label my bottles Laudanum but the made up name: Laudrum.
There are numerous ways to make such a concoction. I don’t claim mine is the best or even any good. But the result of the following is a nice tasting liqueur with a good opiate buzz. And the best thing: no chemicals or fancy equipment needed.
The pictures are actually of two batches being made. You can see that several of the steps take place at the same time. So don’t get confused by this!

To make two litres of Laudrum you need:

Ingredients:
1) dried poppies (ca. 2.3 kg with seeds = 1.0 kg without the seeds)
2) alcohol (1 litre 80%)
3) aniseed, star anise and/or fennel
4) sugar and dextrose (=glucose)
5) water

Materials:
1) several big pans
2) filter cloth (old t-shirt)
3) several plastic buckets
4) several glass jars
5) stove
6) water bath
7) some cutlery, spatula’s etc (do ask you SO!)
8) 50ml syringe or turkey blaster (optional)

1, Poppies:
This is my recipe and I don’t buy poppies. I grow poppies. So get some seeds, find a deserted plot somewhere in suburbia, and spread them. By the middle of June till July your poppies will look like this:

somniferums come in several pretty colours

Now you can either harvest them now and dry them at home, or let them dry in the field. They will be dry about one month after they bloomed. But beware: heavy rainfall will flush all goodies from your pods.
Now you have dried poppies.



the ones with stems were dried in the field while the others were harvested green and fresh
Crush them. Separate the seeds from the straw by using a kitchen sieve. Use the seeds for food or next years harvest.
You can use a blender to make the straw even finer. But you don’t want it to be too powdery as this will make it harder to filter in a later step.

this is about the coarseness you need

2, Alcohol:
Americans can use Ever-Clear. I use 80% Stroh Rum. The rum is mixed with activated charcoal, from the fish-pond-store, and left for a week or so. The rum should be clear and colourless after this, with no smell other than that of alcohol. This I call “reclaimed rum”.

3, and on:
“Look around and thou wilt find”

Okay now we have everything we need. Let’s get started.


Step 1,
Get a pan that holds your poppies, maybe 10 litres. Or get several pans. Put your poppy straw (1kg) in the pan(s) and cover with water (about 7 litres). Bring to a boil and let simmer for 30 minutes max.



these bits are pretty coarse, smaller would be better

End of part 1

Part 2

Step 2,
Pull the filter cloth over a bucket and secure with a sting.

filtration setup
Careful pour the water from the pan into the bucket. Like straining boiled potatoes, leave as much poppies in the pan as possible. You will get 3 litres of water in the bucket.



this step will take ages if you made your poppy straw into a very fine powder

left: extract nr 1, right: mushy poppies

Step 3,
Add as much fresh water to the pan as you strained off. In this case it is 3 litres.
Bring to a simmer and leave for another 30 min. Strain again.

Step 4,
Repeat step 3.
Now we have done three extraction which gave us about 8 litres of extract. And brown mushy poppies. Throw away the poppies.

extract and worthless poppies

Step 5,
This is going to be tricky. The problem is this: we have a lot of water to evaporate. Water boils at a temperature at which morphine becomes instable. What chemical reaction takes place at these temps is a mystery to me, but it is no good. A temperature of 85 °C seems to be a safe upper limit. But at 85 oC water takes ages to evaporate. Tests -done by me- have shown that M doesn’t rot away immediately at 100 °C, it takes time. So we can boil this water off as long as we do it fast! My solution is to do relative small portions at a time. With a fan blowing dry air over the boiling pots, effectively cooling the solution to almost sub boiling temps by evaporation of…. water. This way no part of the extract is exposed to boiling temps for more than 15 minutes or so. Use large shallow pans, maybe the lids of pans.
Don’t let the extract get to thick. If it gets too thick, there is very little water left, so it can easily get too hot, ruining you alkaloids. You have got to stop boiling while you can still pour the extract as a liquid.
For reference: you should have about 1 to 2 litres left.

I am sure there must be much better ways to get water out of an extract. But this one is simple, only requires kitchen stuff, and a day off work.
Maybe the handier types of folk would construct a vacuum rotation film evaporator of cause, which can evaporate at lower temp and with greater speed…

use a broad, shallow pan, or a lid of a pan in this case

a second batch is being made in the back

all batches boiling in, simultaneous

End of part 2

Part 3

Step 6,
Set up a water bath, preferably with a thermostat, and evaporate most of the last water. With a fan over the liquid it should take about 12 hours to reduce the last one litre to about 500 ml’s. You can use a boiling water bath, because the evaporating water will cool you solution down (fan!). Make sure your bath does not boil dry! If you have a thermostat bath, set it to 85 °C.
How dry? You don’t want a dry crust; we want something we can scoop like thick maple syrup.

a water bath setup in beginning

the same setup after about 12 hours

Step 7,
Fill jars half with the thick gooey extract and fill up with 80% alcohol. Shake a few minutes. Leave for a day and shake again. Now leave for a week or longer.

Step 8,
In time the alcohol and extract will have separated again, with a dark brown clear upper layer and a lighter murky bottom layer. Now we want the upper without any bottom silt. This can be done by decanting or better: use a big syringe. Keep the clear upper layer in a large bottle.

the jar on the right has the product from step 6 mixed with 80% alcohol and shaken,
the jar on the left was left alone for a week and has separated in an layer of raw Laudanum (top) and silt (bottom)

siphoning the top layer of with a big syringe

Step 9,
Refill the jar, still half full with sediment, now with 40% (or 50%) alcohol. Shake, wait a day, shake, wait a week and separate like in step 8.

adding alcohol to the silt

separation has taken place, see that the silt has become lighter in colour because of denaturising of proteins


Step 10,
This is the same as step 9 but now with 20% alcohol.
After siphoning of the last top layer, you can throw away the slurry. It should be depleted.

The reason I go down on the % of alcohol is an economic one. This way the loss on alcohol in the final sediment layer is minimal. Dutch economics?

Step 11,
Mix the 80%, 40% and 20% extracts together. Now we have about 1.5 litres of dark brown liquid, which should contain the best part of 1 litre of 80% alcohol. All we have to do is add some flavour and dilute it in the end to 2 litres of 40% papaver liqueur.
.
Step 12
This is the best part: the flavouring. This is where we can make a difference. Like the difference between moonshine and a 10 year old single malt. Both do the job but they don’t taste the same, right?

My personal favourite recipe is (for two litres):
-20 grams of aniseed,
-5 grams of star anise and
-15 grams of fennel seed
-200 grams of sugar and
-350 grams of dextrose/glucose
And a few other secret taste makers, which are a secret. So I am not gonna tell you!
In the end it will have a real nice soft anis/liquorice taste to it and a hell of a punch!
But don’t take my word, get your herbs and spices out and blend your own tasty Laudanum or if you take my final recipe: Laudrum Mollis.

final product and one of the flavourings, as a finishing touch; make an old fashioned style label

Other good active ingredients are: Ginkgo Biloba or Ma Huang both have a good synergy with the laudanum and they add nicely taste too.

An other variation is to replace the “reclaimed rum” for Ouzo, Pernod or Pastis. You will need three bottles of 70cl though. But you spare yourself the trouble of reclaiming rum. And no need to make the final product to taste: the ouzo and raw laudanum taste good enough.

This is when two of my hobbies meld and become one. Ah, how beautiful…. Darn, gotta keep off the stuff, this is too good.
Be careful!

Just a quick recap:
1) Simmer grinded poppy straw in water for a maximum of 30 minutes
2) Filter
3) Do step 1 and 2 a second time
4) Do step 1 and 2 a third time and combine filtrates
5) Boil of excess water quickly in small batches with a fan blowing over the surface
6) Evaporate the last bit of water with a water bath, direct heat would get too hot
7) Fill a jar half way with the extract, add alcohol, shake, wait a bit, shake, wait a week
8) Siphon of the top layer = raw laudanum/laudrum
9) Add fresh alcohol, shake, wait a bit, shake, wait a week for the second time and separate like in step 8
10) Add fresh alcohol, shake, wait a bit, shake, wait a week for the third time and separate like in step 8
11) Mix all the alcohol extracts together and dilute to about 40%
12) Bring to taste, make a nice label and you are READY!
Get your vintage copy of DeQuincey´s Confessions out, and nod back to Victorian England!

Many thanks to Ab Strak and Bogumil.

Yours,
Fogle



End of part 3

like, WOW!

i'm sure you didn't use actual poppy straw in this hypothetical experiment, but i wanted to extend my compliments on both your recipie and your excellent illustration thereof. nice work!

Thanks Ayed, and yes your are right. I did forget the disclaimer, so here it is:

In the forgoing pictorial a non-morphine strain of Papaver Orientalis was used.
This experiment was not even actually conducted by me, but by a distant family member whose picture collection was part of a recently acquired inheritance. (Thanks uncle Thomas r.i.p.).

Wow Fogle!

Im speechless. This is a totally cool step by step. You have to let me know what kind of digi cam you are using. Such a pictorial reads so much nicer than the boring procedures we find usually. This will become an internet no.1. I will definately try this one.

Especially the sedimenting step is cool.

LOL. I just saw the etiqettes on the last two pics. The second last one is almost a picture with the funnel in front of the bottle. Really cool.

I raise my cup!

Very nice step by step illustrated recipe. Very kewl bottle labeling.

Couple questions: first, why leave the straw so course? If straining thru a series of metal strainers and cloth it doesn't seem like such a big deal. Besides, if you had straw rendered to flour it shouldn't take but only two extractions. Second, why not use 50% alcohol, 50% water instead of water alone for extracting? As long as it was "simmered" away from open flame with ventilation there would be no need to mess with babysitting jars, would there?

Nevertheless, very nice looking homemade Laudanum.

Hi halo,

Well like I said in the recipe, this is just how this is done over here and there must be loads of other ways to do this. Although most things were thought through.

For example: the coarseness of the straw. The limiting factor here is not the amount of poppies available (thanks to guerrilla farming, he he ) but the amount of time available in the kitchen (s.o. territory ). So ease of filtration is a factor. And making the straw to flour consistency would frustrate the filtering considerably. The problem is the starch within. If the straw is too fine, it will swell up with hot water like wallpaper glue. Making it more like porridge = not nice to filter. A lot of water is left in the slurry.
When the first experiments were conducted, a lot of poppies were wasted due to this. There is still some unfilterable mess in the freezer right now.

Nor sure what you mean by using 50% w/w alcohol for the extraction. Like in step1? That would be a total of 8 litres of extraction fluid, i.e. 4 litres of pure alcohol. Maybe a bit too expensive? But if a cheap source of ethanol is found, I will try this for sure. The swelling of the starch won’t happen in 50% alcohol for example, so very fine poppy powder can be used. The same would be true for a cold water extraction ala Ab’s iceolater by the way.

Fogle

Yeah I was thinking abou just extracting straight away with cheap vodka maybe 40%, using flour, a couple times wouldn't hurt, then going from there. But you are right about two things, one is that ethanol ain't that cheap, and two is that there are several viable ways of doing this. In the end if it works and you know it then you have succeeded.

Regards

Ah, Fogle the alchemist, turning straw into liquid gold! This is the type of thread that makes the Porg an educational resource. Keep up the good work!

Here some things I found out recently:

Poppy straw, no matter how fine filters great, when:

a) extracted into isopropanol and then
b ) filtered through a kitchen paper ("charmin-style") folded so that it fits in a coffee filter - holder.

After that it can be filtered through the double layer of kitchen paper and then goes very easily through coffee filters, no matter what the pore-size is.

The iso evaporates very fast at very low temperatures. 50C are enough. And it is very cheap, I paid maybe 4 EUR for 5L.

I dont like drugs.

Good point Bog. Alcohols are very thin and I have never had problems filtering with them.

Excellent Tutorial!!! I love seeing step by step pictures on this stuff it's just nice to see it. They do this type of thing on all the cannabis sites so why not do it here. It's very educational. It gives me good ideas. Thank you.

THis is an excellent tutorial. THank you very much.

It's the most interesting way to have laudanum with pt,buty you have to be there...alway to chck up all the process...thanks that will done.

My thanks also Fogle, that looked like it took a lot of time and effort to post. I love this site. You guys are GREAT!!

great write up i made this over the last week or so- however ,i think my produce was bunk or something went wrong somewhere, the resulting extract was so salty a shot full gave me a bad gut and made me puke

*update* ,rather than waste this salty brew i reduced it back down to a 'sludge' ,put it into a large plastic bag ,pressed it flat to about 3mm and froze it ,now it just stays in the freezer and i break off a piece as needed,its easier to get down than the original, anyone have any views as to why this turned out so salty ? (it was like seawater) ,only thing i can think of is my arrangement was salted to make ppl like me stop using them for tea.

This is odd. A salty product is new to me.

Let's see, what goes in the brew? Pods, off cause, and water. Oh and alcohol and maybe some tasty additions.

The pods contain some salts, like salts of meconic acid, but no enough to make the final product salty. The water: our water here is extremely soft, hardly any calcium.
Did you use tap water or demi? And how much did you use in comparison to the amount of pods?

What kind of alcohol did you use? I don't no of any salty drinks, but what do I know....

Seawater is about 7% NaCl if remember correctly. If you used 1:8 pods water and in the end bring that back to about 1.5 part of laudanum, than -if the water was the culprit- the water originally contain 0.1%. Which is still too much for consumption. So that could not be the problem.

I am at a loss here. Maybe you can grind up a pod from the same source and taste it.

Good luck!

By the way: what was your final product? Was it the boiled down extract or did you do also the alcohol extraction of the extract?
Maybe I lost the salt in the last step where the clear alcohol layer is siphoned off, leaving the salts in the sludge layer.

i originally followed your guide,which i know is not at fault (hell you cant go wrong ) ,i make my own alcohol which i purify tho charcoal and is around 90% and used this as directed -shake with water extract -settle and draw off ,i then flavoured the alcoholic extract with anise and wormwood extract,i'll admit myself that im at a loss as to where the excess salt came from,final product was a reduced extract of the alcoholic tincture so it should be quiet clean and last awhile in the freezer (all alcohol was removed so to allow freezing,will also contain trace amounts of anise oil and thujone)

Out of curiosity, what would a starting dose be? You never really said.


.5g/ml is fairly potent, yes?

Great tutorial,
If SWIM was making his own brew as per instructions but with iso alcohol how long would it take to simmer out the majority of the alcohol? SWIM doesn't get along with booze but is looking for a method of consumption which extracts most of the goodies and packs a punch as his tolerance is high.

simonson

if using iso you wouldnt have to simmer just soak ,iso is a high alcohol and on a stove you would end up setting the house onfire (and yourself) ,also depends what quality iso you have i.e rubbing alcohol is around 70%iso 30% water so you would soak then use a hot water bath to speed evaporation then you could put on a stove to reduce water content,make sure you have plenty ventilation

*forgot to add,once you have your flower glue reduced down the easiest way to tranfer is to redisolve in a little iso and tranfer to whatever you are keeping it in,otherwise just trying to tranfer straight from reduction you will have the glue everywhere (it stick like shit to a blanket),its worth doing this and putting the transfered on a radiator to take out the bit of water in whatever you used to disolve the glue.

"Podka" was my old name for using pure grain alcohol for tea.

Great photos, instructions, doodage!

Hi Fogle.

Why does adding alcohol to the poppie tea extract the goodies from the poppie tea into the alcohol ?

dogear

Hi dogear

It is more like: The goodies will dissolve in both water -tea- and alcohol (or a mix of both). No advantage there. But alcohol is much more selective than water. Meaning alcohol wont dissolve all the other gunk that gets extracted with the water.
If you check the pics you will see a thick gooey sludge at the bottom after the alcohol is added. That is a mix of cholofyl, complex sugars, proteins etc that wont go into the alcohol.
So it is more a case of what isn't dissolved in the alcohol. Making Laudrum is a much cleaner product than tea. Making it possible to have the same dose in a smaller volume: one small gulp of Laudrum = one cup of tea.

But there is a price to pay: some goodies get lost in the process . Maybe up to half of them....
I would love to find out for sure where exactly. But without a CG-MS analysis if all fractions we will never know....

Hope that clears it up.
Fogle

yup, that clears it up. Thats great. thanks.

dogear

Fogle

After re-reading your response to my *Why Alcohol* question and you said that alcohol is more specific in absorbing the goodies.

I am wondering why not just start off with alcohol in the first place
when making the laudanum?

dogear

That IS how I make laudanum.... I do an ISO....then evap off...then add some Jagermeister...and you have a very near 'authentic' tasting spirit.

Oh, this may have been posted somewhere before, but if you use some 151 Rum....with 1 cup of pod grounds...let stand for 1 week (shaking vigorously as often as you think about doin it).... then strain.....keep grounds for a second/third run.... take liquid and add to 1 cup of NEW grounds....keep doing this (you will have to add a lil more alcohol each time you put liquid into NEW grounds-but not much.... what you wind up with is a MEGA-potent spirit which should be taken with the utmost of care!!! I have made brews that 1/2 TABLESPOON ROCKED us!!! so becareful and have fun.


~S~

sounds yummy

I'm intending to try this home science experiment when I can
get my hands on some more dried vegetable material
(e.g., alfalfa or sorghum). This time, I'll try adding saffron,
as I've developed a taste for saffron tea.

This thread also inspired my subconscious, as follows
(to the tune of 'Kodachrome', by Paul Simon)

"Laudanu-u-u-u-u-m,
gives us those lovely feelings
Keeps the WDs from squealin',
Makes us think all the world's a funny day
I got my grounds and liquor
Wish the steep went quicker
Oh, momma, don't take my laudanum away
<break>
Momma don't take my laudanum
And leave your boy so sad and glum
Momma don't take my laudanum awa-a-a-a-y. . . "

Gen, you are just tooooo much! (and I mean that in the best possible way). You might also consider the line "makes for some viv-id dreamin'" in place of "gives us those lovely feelings"
but who am I to tamper with a work of inspired genius?
uh-oh, seem to have contributed to OT'ing a topic again. and that was one of my New Year's resolutions, to stay on-topic! damn.

So has anyone else had much success with this method.... I of course understand the concept, I'm just trying to figure out if it would be feasible for me to try this out myself.

Yes, many have. Just follow it step by step, and take your time, it is a solid recipe.

i got a question in mind, if instead of using water in the first step you use alcohol, wouldnt it be quicker and easier?

Veru Good

Anyone tried adding safron to the mix?

What were the results if any?

I'm a little confused as to how to add the herbs and spices. Do you just add them right into the final product, or do you flavor it with some alternate method?

To add additional tastes, a number of methods can be used. You might want to do a search on making spiced liquors, like Pernot or that green wormwood drink (you know, the stuff Van Goch drank).

Anyway, this part of the recipe is so generic I left out the details. But here is one thing I do: get some star anise from the organic shop and some 96% alcohol. Put both in a little bottle and leave for a few week, months, years. After a while the alcohol turns yellow. When I have my basic Laudrum finished I put a few drops of the yellow anise extract into the Laudrum, and keep adding until I have the taste I want.

The others I like to include are, for example, Ma Huang and Ginkgo. Both herbs are set on alcohol (60%) like the anise. The less alcohol the better, because then your extract will be stronger. After a few weeks The herbs will be sitting nicely on the bottom while the alcohol is clear but coloured. Add them drop by drop, once to much you will have to add basic Laudrum to get it diluted. Keep tasting, like you would while cooking a meal. Actually this is very much like cooking.
Make notes on what you add and how much. Although it will be impossible to reproduce a taste exactly, notes will help to get it into the right direction.

Is this what you wanted to know?

Yes, precisely, thanks Fogle.

I didn't see if this had been answered yet.. one could just soak the pods, fresh or dried, in alcohol, right?

yes, try searching for 'podka' or 'tincture' for many other theorys/ideas on this subject.

also I don't buy this whole "if it's under 100 proof fresh pods will rot" theory, because I've seen plenty of recipes for homemade Raspberry Schnappes etc that don't use 100 proof liquor.

Yep, according to some research done by an old-timer named Molly maguire, an alcohol extraction wil get to 50% more alkaloids out of the pods on the first run.
I think the succes depends on the pods you use. The meconate is better soluble in water than it is in alcohol, but the base likes alcolhol better. A solution could be the use of a 50% water alcohol mix?
Anyway I use water in this recipe because it is cheap. If I had access to cheap methanol (less than €1 per litre) I'd use that. Mainly becasue of the lower evaporations temps.
So if you want to use only a few pods, or your pods are expensive, use alcohol.

Oh, using alcohol in the first extractions will give you a dirtier product. Lots of stuff (fats for example) will get into to alcohol phase. Water has less problems with this, the combi water/alcohol is fairly specific to our goodies.

In the end there are a zilion methods to get to something like Laudanum. Some are good, some are only good in specific circumstances, and some are rubish. This here is just my method. It is not the best, but it works for me.

a note of warning to others about the charcoal thing-

I got some Activated Charcoal at the health food store (yeah it's probably more expensive than the Fish Pond Store but I'm more comfortable shopping htere) and mixed it up with my leftover 151. (like a tbs to 1/2 cup) after a few days it seemed to have clarified and I decided to strain it through a coffee filter.

didn't work! most of the charcoal made it through the filter. I guess the clear liquor needs to be siphoned off. I'm glad I didn't do this with a big quantity or have big/immediate plans for the liquor, because it's gotta sit for another 4 days, then I guess I'll have a go at it with a turkey baster.

...

Also I have a question for Fogle- that 1 kg of plant material resulted in that one (500ml?) bottle of liquour?

I was wondering the same thing...it seems like A LOT of plant material for that one bottle, unless that bottle is unbelievably potent.

Bueller, Bueller, Bueller?

The answer is in the original post, see step 11.



This was only one of four similar bottles.

Extracts can be very potent. Ab made an extract from the residue that collects at the bottom of the buckets we use while harvesting. This extract was extremely potent. A small amount of only 10 ml send me of spinning. And I had to take an anti-histamine to combat the nausea.
The method came down to collecting the milky latex upon a small piece of cloth until it gets soaked and dark brown. Next: boiling that cloth in water and boiling the resulting "tea" down. Yes, the best things are very simple. The boiled down goo was mixed with alcohol to preserve it. Dosing is done by a small pipette. Too bad we can only make this during the harvesting. Laudrum on the other hand can be made any time of the year.

Fogle, lemme say that the first thing I wanted to do (after greetings, it ended up being the second oops) was say how amazingly impressive your work to put up that picto-narrative-instructional (hypothetical) guide is. I live in the desert southwest of America, and you've inspired me to, should I be blessed by the powers that be, put up a hot-zone photo narrative of my (california or other legal) poppies this year. Thanks Fogle! I hope you're going to put out some more great work for us to drool over. Beautiful!

-Kit

Some woman I met read this thread a hundred times, and even did a scaled down version of the stuff. The results were quite impressive.Still she wonders ; cannot the first steps be eliminated and the extraction be done with grain alchohol right from the start? She has read that a water extraction leaves behind some unwanted material, but she is no chemist and wonder why the hell not to just start with the achohol in the first place? Everclear is easy to get where she lives, and since she is working with such a small volume that cost is really not a mitigating factor. Eliminating all that cooking down sure simplifies the proceess, as everclear on its own evaporates quite quickly, so reducing to the desired volume is a snap. I keep telling her to stop messing with this stuff, but, hey, you know how women are....

I think the water extraction is to leave some of the stuff behind that you don't want that the alcohol will suck out of the material. Plus water is great for extraction of the goodies you do want.

Then after using alcohol to extract from the tea is to get a more pure goodies from all the other stuff that might be in the tea. That is my understanding correct me if I am wrong.

My wooden headed friend probably wont try this.

You can always make a vaccum and then the water will boil at a very low temperature.

Search on this site, there is a guy who made a vaccum very easily. Lower the internal pressure of a container will lower the pressure needed for liquid water to become gaseous.

When you thought chemistry was just a class, SHAME ON YOU!

Very nice. I still make my tea the old fashioned way. Material, water, mix, strain, drink.
My friend makes laudanum like fogle does. Good read!