Burdock Root Bitters

Burdock announces itself in late summer as the plant covered in small hooked burrs that cling to every sock and passing dog — the same burrs, incidentally, that inspired the invention of Velcro. Its leaves are enormous, elephant-eared and slightly furred on the underside, easy to spot from a distance long before the burrs appear. Underground, though, it grows a long, dark taproot, and this tincture is pressed from that root alone: bitter, earthy, faintly sweet underneath. The root has fed and medicated in roughly equal measure across Europe and East Asia for centuries — gobo, in Japan, is the very same plant eaten as a vegetable. Herbalists have long turned to burdock root to support healthy liver function and the body's own detoxification processes, an old ally of sluggish digestion and troubled skin alike. We hand-dig second-year roots before they bolt to seed, when the taproot is longest and its bitter and inulin content is at its peak, from hedgerows across the Pacific Northwest. The root is chopped fresh and extracted whole, with nothing standardized or stripped out along the way. Thirty drops in a little water before meals, in the old bitters tradition, to wake the digestion before it has to work. Unglamorous, slightly muddy-tasting, and exactly what a root that grows in ditches ought to taste like.