Making Juniper Berry Infusion

"These are Juniper berries. They're mixed with some other woody plants. But the juniper berries, you could make an infusion, but I would prefer because they're very hard, is I just put the two tablespoons in a stainless steel, very important its stainless steel. Stainless steel pot. And then I take quite a lot of water. A lot more than a cup. Maybe two or three cups. And I let this boil, let it simmer, you can even do it for a couple of hours. That way you're getting all the medicinal properties, the active compounds. And this one with the juniper, a lot of people don't know it but juniper has an anti viral compound in it. And it?s often nice to make a juniper decoction or even a juniper tea just as you're getting a cold or something else that has to do with a virus. So it?s really quite simple with the infusion and with the decoction. It?s just a matter of how thick the product is with the decoction. So with the decoction you can, you know, half an hour, one hour. Sometimes you can just even have it simmering all day long really extracting those active medicinal compounds. Now with juniper, such a beautiful plant, they actually make gin from it. But what has been discovered is that there's an anti viral compound that is called deoxypodophyllotoxin. And that will inhibit a variety of flu viruses as well as the Herpes virus. So it?s kind of worth it to be cooking this up on your stove if you can use this instead of a pharmaceutical. When you feel that there?s enough in, that it?s made a really nice juice, then just go ahead take your sieve and just pour it out. You don't want to be taking all these woody kind of plant materials. You just want the juice that's coming from it. The other thing I want to mention before we end this clip is that a mortar and pestle is also really important. Because if you have like in this group of different herbs, if they're all very different some of them will settle to the bottom. of the pot or the stainless steel pot. So you just want to give it a little bit of a, you just really want to kind of grind it down. Now you may not want to do that too often, but sometimes even with a more finer died herb combination a mortar and pestle is very important. So that?s another utensil that you'll want to have in your kitchen."