The card says 1:5. The jar needs milliliters.
Your herb weight times your ratio gives the menstruum; your target ABV against your spirit's ABV splits it into the spirit-and-water pour, down to the bottles it fills. Everything stays in your browser.
The jar
Your costs
The standing order
The numbers here are yours to check. This page does arithmetic on what you type — it cannot see your recipe, your equipment or your batch.
For anything you will eat or sell as food, double-check it against your own process and your local rules. This page does maths, not food safety.
Want it to remember?
In MadeKeeper the same make consumes the herb grams, the spirit, and the bottles from inventory, and the cost per bottle lands in your ledger right under the price you charge. See for herbalists & farmstands or poke around the live demo. $19/mo for the whole back office, kept for as long as you stay. The shop stays free for cost a piece and one fair — no product cap. The tax packet, Etsy and Square, and more fairs are the $19.
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Straight answers about the arithmetic — and straight about which numbers are yours, not ours.
Why is the ratio a setting instead of a built-in number?
Because 1:5 is a recipe, not a law. Working herbalists keep everything from 1:2 to 1:10 on their cards depending on the herb and the tradition they learned in — 5 sits in the default box because a default box needs a number, not because it outranks your card, and you should overwrite it the moment yours says otherwise. The notation reads herb weight to menstruum volume, so 100 g of dried herb at 1:5 calls for 500 ml.
How does the spirit-and-water split work?
It's plain dilution arithmetic on two numbers you enter: spirit equals the total menstruum times your target ABV divided by your spirit's ABV, and water is whatever's left. So 500 ml at a 50% target from a 95% spirit works out to 263 ml of spirit and 237 ml of water. Both percentages are yours — the target the way your recipe wants it, the spirit the way the bottle in your cabinet reads — and when either changes, the pour changes with it.
Can it tell me how strong the tincture is, or how much to take?
No — and that's deliberate. This page does volume arithmetic: herb weight, menstruum, the pour, the bottle count, nothing more. Strength, dose, and what any herb does are questions for your own training, your teacher, and the sources you already work from, and this calculator stays out of that territory in both directions.
How does it count bottles?
It divides the menstruum by your bottle size and rounds down, since a part-filled bottle isn't one you can put on the table. 500 ml into 59 ml bottles — the 2 oz size — is 8 full bottles with 28 ml left over. The count assumes you recover the whole pour; whatever the marc holds back at pressing comes out of that remainder first, so treat the last bottle as a maybe.