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Semi large scale herbal tea processing

 
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First post here.
Wonder if any of you know of good ways to cut/mix ready dry herbs for herbal teas? I can use a food processor but I think there are more gentle ways (less oxidizing). I want to do it on a slightly larger scale that for only myself. A few 100g at a time.
I've seen large machines but that's to big for my needs (and wallet and space).
Thanks for any thoughts.
 
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Hi Marcus,

Welcome to Permies.
 
steward
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Marcus, welcome to the forum.

This might depend on what kind of herbs you want to process and how much you want to spend.

What is the goal of the semi large scale herbal tea processing?
 
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Hi Marcus, welcome to Permies.

I do this for various herbs for tea (generally anise, mint, verbena, lemongrass, but also some others like indigo) and this is my process:

-pick the herbs in the morning
-wash with hose (knock off bugs and anything nasty)
-pick off any bad parts
-if they have a woody stem, I tie a few stems together and hang them on hooks under my carport to dry (air circulating, no direct sun). If weather gets humid, I put them in my car (dark windows, gets warm inside).
-things like mint that aren't on branches that can hang (or herbs that need to be picked through because of bug damage, flowers, or other things I don't want), I will lay out on screens and put in the same areas as above.

Once dry (crackles and crumbles in my hand) I strip them off their branches and crumble the leaves with my hands I do this in a very large basin, if I want a certain leaf size I'll strain it through hardware cloth or wire sieve.
I use them for tea, so I generally just crumble with hands and that's fine. I store in glass jars or zippy plastic bags if I'm giving it away.
 
marcus nordgren
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Thank you for describing your ways! Mine is quite similar but I dry almost everything still on their branches, hanging in a closed room with an dehumidifier (it it's later in the season). I'm with you all the way until the last part. It would be hard to crumble all leafs by hand and I want the pieces to be of a similar size so that the tea mixes evenly.

If it was only for me I could do it by hand (and knife for some tougher leafs) but wanting to scale up a bit makes me want to explore other ways. There are machines (like this https://ele-mash.com/production/grinding-equipment/grinding-plant ) but I wonder it there are not smaller ones, or how did they do in history?
 
Tereza Okava
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Here we grow erva mate (ilex) and they are hard to crush. Old mills used huge wooden rollers, I've seen a few. A similar alternative might be a rolling pin on an irregular surface (the old ones I've seen have "fingers" that stick out of the rollers and correspond to similar holes on the floor below.
 
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Tereza Okava wrote:Here we grow erva mate (ilex) and they are hard to crush. Old mills used huge wooden rollers, I've seen a few. A similar alternative might be a rolling pin on an irregular surface (the old ones I've seen have "fingers" that stick out of the rollers and correspond to similar holes on the floor below.



Aha, interesting! I'll try to se if can find something about this online.
 
Anne Miller
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Check out Hammer Mills as they say they make a unit for home production.

https://www.hammermills.com/equipment/food-grade-mini-mill/


The say that this mill is for herbs and spices:

The Mini Mill is available in two sizes, the smaller MiniMill-4 can process between 50 and 100 lbs/hour of various materials. This completely portable unit plugs into a standard wall outlet.

 
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How about a drill powered ball mill?
 
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It can still be done by hand.

It was decided to harvest our mulberries by cutting a lot of branches off. We picked the berries off, and froze them. Then I leaned the branches against some trees for several days without rain. This allowed lots of air flow to begin dehydration process.

Once the leaves began show dry portions, we stripped them off the branches onto a sheet. I put the leaves, on the sheet, in the greenhouse until they were fully potato chip crunchy dry. Then I wadded up the sheet, real tight, which broke up the leaves easily. I did place the leaves in a gallon ice cream bucket and crunched them a bit more by opening and closing my fists. This resulted in particles similar to retail herbs sold as "cut and sifted". None of this was hard work. The stripping  took some time. The scrunching took less than an hour for a yield of 15 gallons of dry leaves to use as ice tea.

Edit: It is very humid here, if I simply hang my herbs as others describe, they just mildew.
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marcus nordgren
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Anne Miller wrote:Check out Hammer Mills as they say they make a unit for home production.



Good finding! I already have a hammer mill but it is quite big that I use for other stuff and  I was thinking it there was a method more gentle. A machine for chopping with knifes?

And thank you Joylynn Hardesty for your description. I can do this with most leafs but some are just to tough. Like dried birch leafs.
 
marcus nordgren
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William Bronson wrote:How about a drill powered ball mill?



I cant find anything on this. To you know some models?
 
William Bronson
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Here is an Instructible  that shows a very basic one.
https://www.instructables.com/Poor-mans-ball-mill/

There are others on that site.

I have a couple of hand held blenders and I'm considered altering one of the beaters so it can spin a horizontal container.
It would have the advantage of built in speed control.

The motor and switch from a multispeed box fan might work as well.

A glass gallon jar could be a good container for this.
They have a nice volume,are made of food safe material and the sides are parallel.

.
 
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A cheap (ish) concrete mixer makes a good ball mill. Leave the agitators out when you put it together. The hard part is figuring out the right size and weight of balls for your material. Billiard balls are a good start.
 
Anne Miller
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Marcus is suggesting that he wants something that is gentler than a food processor or at least that is how I interpret what has been said.

While these do not process semi large scale herbs at one time, these tools might make processing gentler on the herbs.

I've searched multiple-blade knife herb cutters to find these:


https://www.ebay.com/itm/174275310435


https://www.ebay.com/itm/115644875426


https://www.ebay.com/itm/255415254517


https://www.ebay.com/itm/255532147865


https://www.ebay.com/itm/394233424607
 
William Bronson
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I was thinking that a long slow roll in a ball mill wouldn't raise the temperature much at all.
Functionally I'd expect it to act like a mortar and pestle.
 
marcus nordgren
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Thanks for all suggestions! I've never considered a ball mill (only thought it was for powders and oily products). I still think some of the leafs are to tough also for a ball mill and that knifes would be a better option there. The manual ones suggested might be an option but I rather find something a bit mot mechanical supported. Like this I found.
Don't know if it would work on completely dry leafs or only tobacco?

 
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