From here: http://home.roadrunner.com/~thadson/savelife/schulze/articles/06curedisaster4...

SCHULZE: Exactly. How do you know that what you are filtering out is unimportant? You don't. I filtered my extracts only through crude cotton towels. They came out with residue and solids left in them. These residues and solids have many healing chemicals and resins in them. They are part of the healing plant chemistry, too. Modern manufacturing wants herbal products to have low residues, to look clean like filtered apple juice. Most products are filtered through such fine micron mesh filters that they even take the color out. I know that even the chemicals that color the plant are part of its healing power - like beta-carotene and chlorophyll. One lab tech at a gigantic herbal company bragged to me by saying that they had such incredibly efficient filtering machinery that they could actually filter an herbal extract back into water. I tasted their products and they did taste like herbal "water." 

When you're making your first tincture/s and everything you've ever seen is 'clear' - it's definitely good to ask & make sure :) 

I'm a big fan of HerbPharm for tinctures, but (imo) they're along way from the quality we can make ourselves.  My guess is their "pristinely perfectly clear tinctures" are that way due to customer expectations.  since we've all been extremely conditioned to desire (and hold "sacred) extremenly unnatural and demented standards of "purity & sterility", suppliers comply.  Would that we could all take a trip in a 'time machine' and scan through the past 10,000 years - we'd all see quite clearly that virtually everything we've come to "desire" has been thorougly manipulated by intense societal brainwashing (particularly over the last 100 years - search on Edward Bernays for more information).

Flour, salt, sugar = white & fluffy.  Tinctures = clear.   Hmmmm

Btw, a tincture press will not make a tincture less cloudy (in fact, the opposite is more likely true) - it's the size of the "mesh" of the filtering material that matters.

TINCTURE ON!

Uny