Daniel Vitalis Creator of the Elixir Craft Mastery Program on Tasting Our Medicines
In this article, Daniel Vitalis shares step by step the creation of an elixir and some surprising ideas on how to “test” our medicines. Daniel Vitalis has accumulated a wealth of experience in water and elixir knowledge and has created the Elixir Craft Mastery Program.
Kevin: We’re talking a lot about elixirs and I’m sure there are people on the call who don’t even know what you put in an elixir. I’m not even sure what kind of stuff you put in your elixirs. So why don’t you explain some of the stuff that it puts in and then we explore some of the different questions that some people have specifically about different herbs and that thing?
Daniel: Excellent. Okay, the base of every elixir, you know you’ve heard the saying, “We built this from scratch”, elixirs are built from the water up. So what I do is start with the water that I collect. Sometimes I’ll change that a bit. For example, in Maine over the next few weeks we are going to start harvesting water birch and maple trees, which is made into maple syrup or birch syrup. So sometimes you can get liquids out of places like that. Sometimes you can extract liquids from plants to make juices. But most of the time, the base of my drinks will be spring water.
what I pick up
The course itself takes you sequentially through the Elixir Master of Craft Program. It’s a sequential thing that I built, starting with the water. The second step is that I’m often going to take that water and make it into a tea. As an example, today my tea was dandelion root, dandelion leaf, nettle leaf, burdock root, dandelion root with rose hips. I just threw those things away. I like them together. That’s the medicine I want right now. Again, it’s not a specific prescription that I’m trying to get people to follow, it’s just what I’m using right now because those are the drugs I want right now. So it is always changing. Whatever herbs you’re working with, you can make them into a tea. That’s the second part of Elixir Craft and that’s the second part of that course. What we talk about is how to create teas, which are essentially water-based extractions.
So what I like to do is extract herbs or medicine in the water, so now I have a tea. I can take that tea and add it to my blender, I really love VitaMix blenders. I wish they weren’t plastic, but I love them. Throw that tea into the blender and that’s where you can start adding your superfoods. When the superfood thing started, what happened was, all of a sudden, we had all these plant-based flours. They are essentially flours, like in the way that you have wheat flour, flour powder. What we ended up with was chocolate flour, maca flour, mesquite flour, carob flour, all those powdered foods. Well, what do you do with these things? Well I was like, just mix them in the tea. So I started mixing them. That’s like the third step, I’m going to start mixing these different powders.
So what we have to think about is, “If I just have tea with some powder, I’m not going to be very satisfied. I need some calories.” So what we need to determine is, “Do I want my calories to come from protein, sugar, or fat?” Those are the only places you will get your calories from. So what you can do then is start adding things… For example, if you want to go fat, you can add coconut butter. If you want to eat protein, you can add something like chlorella. If you want to feed on sugar, you can add honey. That’s where you can start adding calories.
What I do is I start with that water and I start to accumulate it and add medicine to it. That sounds like something that would take a long time, but once you understand the system, it’s very fast. So I can whip up meals in about five minutes that contain so much nutrition that I’d say one of my drinks, on average, probably contains more ingredients and more nutrition than the average American eats over the course of an entire month. It is about combining medicine and nutrition. Hippocrates said: “Let food be your medicine and medicine be your food.” What we’re doing is taking all that medicine and turning it into food, whether it’s these elixirs, and then drinking that.
The goal is for it to taste good. If it tastes bad, you’re not doing it right. If it tastes bad, there is a subtle rejection of your body. In other words, your body doesn’t like it very much. It’s like giving you the message, “Hey, I don’t like this.” So it’s not really open to receive it. The whole point is to align the flavors with what your body is really asking of you. So what we’re talking about is something a lot like the best shake you’ve ever tasted, except it’s got all the medicine from food and super longevity herbs.
Kevin: Now, is there a place for things that don’t taste good that your body is assimilating, like very potent herbs and that sort of thing?
Daniel: That’s a great question. I’m surprised you asked that because this is what I mean. What doesn’t taste good? Is bitter a bad taste? We have a mental program. Bitterness can be in really bad taste if you were raised on Mountain Dew and Ding Dongs. I grew up with those things and the bitter tasted bad to me. Over time, I have come to really appreciate the taste of things that are bitter or that we could say don’t taste good.
Kevin: Interesting.
Daniel: If there’s one thing that doesn’t taste right, it’s where the flavors mix inappropriately. If they are poorly mixed, it does not taste good. But I think that most medicinal herbs taste good. One of the things that I like to do in Elixir Craft is instead of trying to hide the flavor, instead of trying to cover up and mask the flavor, I like to try to bring out the flavors. So if something is bitter, I’d rather work with it than hide it. Here is a little secret. The next statement could add a great deal of value to the lives of its listeners. It’s going to sound very simple, but if you let this unfold and meditate on it, you will come to understand something that very few people understand today. You know they don’t get it because you can see how our herbal systems work. We encapsulate things. The Chinese told us that the taste of a medicine was an integral part of its effect. In other words, if you take your weed and you put it in a little capsule and you swallow it and your body doesn’t even come in contact with it and the substance in that capsule breaks open in your stomach and you bypass your taste buds, your body you will not get the full effect of that drug. So instead of trying to hide your likes, bring them out. If something is bitter, a little salt and a little sweet can really bring out the beautiful part of that bitter, instead of trying to hide or disguise it. I really like working with flavors.
Kevin: Where do you find pure herbs?
Daniel: That’s another big question because we’re really running into some issues in our culture right now. I won’t go into any of the negatives here, but we’re all seeing some big changes happening here in this country right now that are economic in nature. The beautiful thing about that is that it brings us to local economies. It is driving us to work together. The paradigm of shipping food from all over the world, from various locations, to your door, is not going to last that long. We’re going to have to start sourcing things locally. The best things will come from nature, wild where you live.
The next best thing will come from somewhere else. The next best stuff will be grown by people, and grown by people in a very smart way, locally.
The next best thing is things that have been very cleverly grown and shipped to you. Where it starts to get really weird is when you start accessing things that are grown poorly that you don’t know where they’re from. So what I would say is you could access things locally like local gardeners, local herbalists. If you can take walks through natural forests, you can get the best things. Otherwise, look for reputable companies that produce things organic or beyond organic. As you know, organic is becoming meaningless. What we need to find is things that are beyond organic, things that are biodynamically grown or wild-crafted.
I get a lot of stuff from the same place as you, Kevin. Lots of great superfoods, raw food folks out there, they’re bringing the best stuff. I like companies like Mountain Rose Herbs. I get a lot of stuff from them. And I pick up a lot of my herbs more and more. That’s something I’ve learned to do over the years. That is something that I know will be something that I will learn over the course of many, many more years, over the course of my life. It is not something that is learned immediately. A company like Mountain Rose Herbs is a great place to start. Over time, you can learn how to make it yourself directly from nature. That’s where you go to get the best stuff.