What is Birch Bark Extract and How is it Made?
Birch Bark Extract is a popular dietary supplement for promoting healthy joints, skin health, and supporting the immune system, but what exactly is it?
What Makes Birch Bark Extract so Special?
Birch Bark Extract and Chaga are very similar. Birch bark extract and the Chaga mushroom share the same major ingredients that make Chaga so popular; betulin, betulinic acid, and lupeol. This is because the Chaga mushroom extracts and absorbs the triterpenes betulin, betulinic acid, and lupeol from the birch bark it grows on.
Birch Bark Extract is special for all of the reasons everyone LOVES chaga, and one can argue Birch Bark Extract is the superior product because it has a much higher concentration of the powerful triterpene ingredients.
What Does Birch Bark Extract Look Like?
Birch Bark Extract is usually encapsulated for use as an ingredient in natural dietary supplements, but if you break a capsule open you can see the fine brown powder for yourself. This fine light brown powder is largely hydrophobic and does not readily dissolve in water.
Quick Tip: If capsules aren’t your thing and you are looking for a liquid Birch Bark Extract to add to your morning coffee routine, you could try a Birch Bark Extract Tincture.
What Does Birch Bark Extract Taste Like?
Many people prefer the more complex woody and fresh taste of Birch Bark Extract to the more dirt-like earthy taste of Chaga. I personally am very fond of the fresh woody taste and aroma of Birch Bark Extract! Even if you don’t care for the taste of Birch Bark Extract either, taking capsules of the extract keep you from tasting the woody Birch Bark Extract itself.
Fun Fact: You have more than likely tasted Birch Bark Extract already! Birch Bark Extract is used as a natural flavoring ingredient in a lot of Root Beer recipes, and even has it’s own dedicated Birch Beer Soda. Some people swear that the taste of true Birch Beer is more complex and tastier than root beer. It’s often described as light, fresh, clean, crisp, and slightly minty.
How is Birch Bark Extract Made?
The process for extracting the highly sought after betulin, betulinic acid, and lupeol from birch bark can be broken down into 3 parts: birch bark harvesting, mechanical processing, and extraction.
Harvesting Birch Bark
Making Birch Bark Extract starts with sourcing the right bark. The bark of different types of birch trees contain varying concentrations of the triterpene compounds we are after. The type of birch tree we use as starting raw material for our Birch Bark Extract dietary supplements is Betula papyrifera, or commonly known as “paper birch.”
Mechanically Processing the Outer Bark
After the bark has been sourced from your choice of birch tree, it then needs to go through physical processing to separate the softer inner bark from the outer bark. The reason the two layers of bark are separated is because the there are very little, if any, triterpenes contained within the inner bark. By physically separating out the outer bark, it reduces the amount of effort needed in the extraction step to get the same yield of Birch Bark Extract.
The last step in processing the bark is to grind it down. By reducing the size of the pieces of birch bark, it allows for a much more efficient extraction and a higher percent yield of Birch Bark Extract.
Extracting with Ethanol
After all of the prep work, here is where the real magic (or more appropriately, chemistry) happens. The reason ethanol is used to extract the triterpenes from birch bark, rather than water, is because triterpenes are hydrophobic. In order to extract the betulin, betulinic acid, and lupeol from the birch bark, the compounds need to dissolve from the rest of the organic material into solution. If water was used instead of ethanol, the triterpene compounds would stay locked in the bark.
Once the the triterpenes have been extracted from the birch bark, the ethanol is poured off and kept. After separating the ethanol form the extracted bark, the ethanol can be evaporated off to leave behind just the highly concentrated Birch Bark Extract we are after!
What Makes Betula Botanicals’ Birch Bark Extract so Unique?
What makes our Birch Bark Extract so unique is our source material. We proudly source the starting birch bark for our birch bark extract dietary supplements from sustainably harvested US birch trees. The bark from these birch trees is discarded in the paper making process, and would otherwise be burned to heat the paper manufacturing plant or just thrown away.
We see the true value that is locked within that discarded bark, and fully agree with the saying “One person’s trash, is someone else’s treasure.” Not only are sourcing from sustainably harvested birch trees, we upcycling the waste stream products from paper processing of those trees.