Sip Your Way to Better Health: Anti-Inflammatory Cocktail Recipe

This anti-inflammatory cocktail is a vibrant, botanical twist on the classic Whiskey Smash. Created by apothecary bartender Cassandra Sears, this wellness-inspired cocktail blends Reishi mushroom extract with antioxidant-rich ingredients, creating a medicinal — and delicious! — bourbon cocktail.

The following excerpt is from Botanical Bar Craft by Cassandra Elizabeth Sears. It has been adapted for the web.

Inflammation and the Stress Response

Inflammare is the Latin term meaning “to set fire.” Everyone knows that inflammation can cause body tissues to become reddened, swollen, hot, and sometimes painful, but we often fail to look for the underlying cause. Inflammation is a natural response that is meant to heal and repair, but when unresolved or out of balance, it can cause maladaptive illness.

Inflammation is the body’s innate immune response

And it includes changes in basic structural barriers like skin, mucous membrane surfaces, and other inherent features like mucus.

The stress response is a cascade of chemical events that unfold as a physiological reaction to perceived stress or actual physical stress. Also known as fight or flight, the stress response is your body’s way of protecting you from harm. Adrenals produce and release adrenaline, which causes blood vessels to narrow, increasing blood pressure. Bronchioles dilate, increasing oxygenation. A cascade of precursor hormones mediated by the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal (HPA) axis within the central nervous and endocrine systems causes the release of cortisol, a steroid hormone that in turn calls for the release of glucose from the liver. Chronic exposure of blood vessels to glucose can lead to cardiovascular disease and cholesterol imbalance.

Most of us live in a state of chronic stress, and often we rely on this natural adrenaline-rich response as a way of enhancing productivity and keeping up a fast pace.

Our ability to respond to stress defines our strength as individuals and collectively. We find ourselves on a continuum encompassing the trajectory of life and health, a line pointing up- and downhill—uphill is the necessary challenge of adaptability, and downhill is degeneration.

It is important to consistently move in the upward direction and push your personal edge of capability. But it is just as crucial not to push yourself to a breaking point, because if you fail to adapt and start heading downhill, it is so easy for problems to snowball. Our survival instinct tells us: Adapt or die.

The study of epigenetics is proving how important our daily choices are, altering the fate of genetic expression and how our DNA is read in this moment, facts that empower the individual toward agency and responsibility when it comes to their own health. Sickness and health are not random; nor are they due to a victim’s bad genetic luck. Someone may have inherited a lot of “bad genes,” but the choices they make—including which phytochemicals they put in their body via diet and herbal tonics, as well as nature immersion and exercise—determine how health outcomes play out. Active (intentional) restorative rest when the body requires it is still an active evolutionary step!

Adaptogens are the class of herbs that are indispensable for creating physiological resistance in times of chronic stress. They are nonspecific and nontoxic therapeutics that can promote neuroplasticity (adaptability), preventing excess cortisol production and the domino-effect damage that can ensue. These botanicals can prevent endocrine system malfunction such as adrenal insufficiency or burnout and immune deficiencies.

Chronic Inflammation

Inflammation in response to injury or infection is an important part of the immune response for healing. But problems arise when there are more inflammatory inputs than the body can handle, and the body never has time to resolve and heal. This is chronic inflammation, which is defined as inflammation that lasts for longer than two weeks and results in tissue damage. Chronic inflammation and stress are interconnected, many times causing each other and both being at the root of many modern disease states.

There are two types of immunity: innate and adaptive. Innate immunity is general, messy, and automatic whereas the adaptive immune response is highly specific, based on a person’s immunological memory.

Oxidative stress is a condition in which an excess of free radicals ramble around inside the body. A free radical is simply a molecule that has an unpaired electron. Formation of free radicals is a normal part of metabolic processes, but when there are too many free radicals, they can cause damage. Too much of this instability is chaos embodied; it can cause DNA damage and genetic mutations that lead to premature aging as well as heart disease and cancer.

Inflammation and Our Moods

There is an intimate link between mood and inflammation, particularly in those with anxiety and depression. People living in a chronic state of inflammation may experience problems with impulse control, making risky decisions. The gut plays a key role in regulating moods because the majority of serotonin is made in the gut.

Lifestyle choices that are pro-inflammatory include less-than-adequate sleep, excess alcohol consumption, dehydration, smoking, inactivity, eating food that is not food, and excessive physical labor or exercise that does not allow for periods of recovery.

Generally, antioxidant-rich plants reduce inflammation. In the face of pain due to inflammation, many people rely on nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs such as aspirin and ibuprofen that block the production of prostaglandins, which are hormone-like chemicals responsible for inflammation and pain as well as swelling. Some plants have a high content of salicylates, which are a key ingredient of aspirin. Some medicinal mushrooms contain beta-glucans, which help move the body from a hot inflammatory state relying on innate immunity to a more intelligent adaptive (immunomodulating) response. Additionally, demulcent herbs that are rich in polysaccharides are directly soothing to tissue. They promote the terrain necessary for the body to facilitate repair. Terrain is a metaphor used by herbalist practitioners to speak about the holistic health of living tissue.

Recipe for Anti-Inflammatory Cocktail: Gates of Immortality

Reishi mushroom has been used as an elixir of immortality for more than a thousand years in Traditional Chinese Medicine.

In this apothecary variation on the traditional Whiskey Smash, the antioxidant and anti-inflammatory power of dark berries and mint, as well as the graceful wild beauty of elder and hawthorn, are the perfect complement to the reishi.

Makes 1 cocktail

Handful mixed fruit: wild blueberries, raspberries, and sweet cherries 11/2 ounces (45 ml)
bourbon 1 ounce (30 ml)
fresh lemon juice 1/2 ounce (15 ml)
honey syrup 1/4 ounce (7.5 ml)
elderflower liqueur
1 dropperful Reishi Tincture (recipe follows)
Several drops Hawthorn Flower Essence (recipe follows)
Club soda
2 sprigs fresh peppermint, for garnishing

Muddle (smash) the berries and cherries in a shaker tin and then add the bourbon, lemon juice, honey syrup, liqueur, Reishi Tincture, and flower essence. Shake it all up and double-strain into a collins glass or Mason jar over ice. Top with the club soda. Give the mint sprigs a little fondle or clap before placing them as a garnish.

NOTE: You can substitute hawthorn tincture if you did not make any hawthorn flower essence in the springtime.

This was a fun project, growing mushrooms on my kitchen countertop and then making double-extracted Reishi Tincture using reishi fruiting blocks from North Spore.

Reishi Tincture

Mushrooms contain both polysaccharides, which are water-soluble, and beta-glucans, which are alcohol soluble. Because of this, I make a double extraction tincture to capture both components. Basically, you make two extracts to combine together.

Makes 1 pint (480 ml)

Fresh reishi mushroom, chopped
95 percent ethanol

Chop fresh reishi mushroom to fill a 1/2-pint jar and cover with 95 percent ethanol. Also begin drying some reishi mushrooms for the water-based decoction.

Let the mushrooms in ethanol sit to extract for 4 weeks, shaking occasionally. By the time the alcohol tincture is ready to be strained and pressed, the mushrooms will be dry and ready to extract in water.

Add the dried mushrooms to a slow cooker with enough water to cover. Heat on high for 1 to 2 hours, then lower the temperature and let simmer for about 8 hours. Strain the hot extract. Combine the alcohol tincture and water extract at a 50:50 ratio.

Hawthorn Flower Essence

Makes 1 pint (480 ml)

Hawthorn blossoms
Well water or spring water
Brandy

The process of making a flower essence is an integral part of its medicine. The process involves meditating and resonating with the flower in its environment. For the essence, you will gather hawthorn (Crataegus spp.) blossoms, which open in springtime in Maine around the same time as apple blossoms.

On a sunny day, prepare a small glass bowl of well or spring water and check to be sure that your garden clippers are clean. Sit with the hawthorn tree and observe its blooms bustling with bees. Breathe and meditate with the tree for 10 to 20 minutes. Then, without touching the flowers, use the clippers to cut a small bunch of them into the glass bowl. Place the bowl under the tree and leave it sitting there for several hours. When you return to gather the flowers’ essence, bring along a little brandy, a funnel, and a dark-amber bottle. Using the funnel, fill the amber bottle halfway with the magic water from the glass bowl. Then fill to the top with brandy.

From Garden to Glass – Crafting Botanical Bliss

About Botanical Bar Craft

This book is both an herbal medicine book for bartenders and a mixology book for herbalists. My goal as a bartender-herbalist is to use the bar as an engaging platform for teaching about plants. In this book I invite you to step inside the fantastic and magical green realm of the plant kingdom—a colorful place of generous abundance, sparking unlimited curiosity.

Join me at the intersection of herbal medicine and craft cocktails. Both places are inspiring, sensually stimulating, fully alive, and free.

“In this beautiful and creative book, Cassandra weaves together the time-honored art of making cocktails with a fresh approach to incorporating botanicals for drinks that build wellness and taste delicious!”

Botanical Bar Craft

A Guide to the Art of Apothecary Cocktails and Herbal Tonic Elixirs

$34.95