Making Walnut Ink
Several people on this forum have expressed interest in making walnut ink. The following is a revised article I wrote on the subject and published on a different forum.
In the summer of '09, the forum had some threads with hints and snippets about walnut ink. Having a few black walnut trees in my yard, I looked on the Internet for more information, hoping to find a recipe. The information I found was mostly misinformation. All of it was conflicting and some was just patently wrong. I put the project on a back burner and began another project.
Then, around the end of October, I received a PM from another network member. She said she had made some walnut ink and would like my opinion of it. A few days later, a sample came in the mail. I liked it a lot. She graciously gave me her recipe. I grabbed my coat and a rucksack and headed for the woods to try to find some walnuts the squirrels had overlooked. I was able to find eight old, black, half-rotted nuts and made a couple of ounces of ink from them. The experiments began. In January of 2010, my ink was completely used up. My contact sent me a whole pint of extract so I could continue my investigations. During the next summer, one of my trees dropped a few immature nuts from time to time, so I could make ink more or less continuously and refine my recipe. The following is a description of my way of making ink from black walnuts (Juglans nigra) and from butternuts (Juglans cinerea).
The ink from both species has a brown color. The walnut ink is a warm brown. Butternut ink has a yellow component that eventually coats the inside of the container the ink is kept in, leaving an ink that is a mousy brown color. It just doesn't "pop" the way walnut ink does.
The ink is fade resistant and water resistant. You can make it as light or as dark as you want it to be. You can make it yourself in about three days (most of that time is waiting). The nuts are usually free for the taking. The equipment needed is inexpensive. What's not to like? Two things:
1. The ink has no lubricity. Zilch. It feels like you are writing with plain water. The nib just drags along.
2. The ink reacts with iron. This wears out a steel dip pen nib much faster than other inks. After writing about 20 pages, a regular pointed nib has sharp edges and needs to be touched up on a stone.
First I want to dispel the misinformation I have read about black walnuts.
The center of the nut is the edible part called the "nutmeat". Surrounding the nutmeat is the "shell". In a mature nut, the shell is roughly spherical and deeply ridged. It is very hard. In an immature nut, the shell starts out soft (in June where I live) and gradually hardens (July), until in late August, it becomes very hard indeed. Surrounding the shell is a fibrous layer called the "husk". While the nut is on the tree, the husk is green. After the nut has fallen in late September, the husk gradually turns black. Ink is made from the husk at any stage.
Mature black walnuts range from the size of golf balls to baseballs. So, in the following recipe, the number of nuts that make an ounce of ink is extremely variable. The easiest way to obtain the husk material is to strew the nuts in your driveway and drive over them a few times. The shells are so hard, the weight of the car won't smash them.
You can also use a knife to cut around the circumference of the husk, down to the hard nut shell and then twist the two halves apart, just like pitting a freestone peach. Pry the shell out of the remaining half husk with the knife point.
Mature butternuts look like walnuts, only they are football shaped. The shell looks like a fat peach pit that is covered with sharp-pointed ridges. One end of the pit is flattened and narrowed to a stiletto-like blade. It would not be wise to drive over these with a car.
What you will need to make an ounce (+) of ink:
A supply of walnuts or butternuts, enough to make 1.5 cups (350 ml) of chopped husk material.
Rubber or vinyl gloves. The stain in the husks will color your skin brown. Only time will remove this stain. It takes about two weeks.
A sharp knife.
A cutting board. You are making ink here, not food. Don't use your kitchen cutting board or butcher block. The stain will never come out and who knows, it could be toxic.
A plastic tub or Pyrex dish, with lid, that will hold about three cups (700 ml).
About three cups (700 ml) of distilled water. Any water will work. Distilled water works best.
A wide-mouth jar that will hold about a pint (700 ml).
A large dispensing syringe or turkey baster.
A small (3 to 5 ml) dispensing syringe with a calibrated barrel. Used for measuring ink and additives.
A few paper towels.
A paper coffee filter.
A Pyrex cake or pie pan.
An oven or food dehydrator.
A two-ounce (60 ml) ink bottle.
A small quantity of high-proof ethyl alcohol. I use 151 proof rum. Other people use 100 proof vodka. You want the alcohol to be as concentrated as possible so you don't have to add much as a preservative and thin your ink too much.
Procedure:
Remove the husk material from the nuts and chop it up, using the knife and cutting board. You want 1.5 cups of finely chopped husk. Put the husk material into the plastic or glass tub and just cover it with boiling distilled water. Put the cover on the tub and let stand for 24 hours.
Strain the liquid through a paper towel into the wide mouthed jar. Put the jar into your refrigerator. Label it!!!!! Return any husk material in the paper towel to the tub and cover with boiling distilled water again. Put the lid on and let stand for 24 hours. Strain the liquid into the jar with the first batch. Discard the spent husk material.
Push a wad of paper towel down into the nozzle end of the large syringe or baster. Cut two four-inch (10 cm) squares from the coffee filter and wrap them around wads of paper towel. Push them down the barrel of the syringe or baster and down against the first wad of paper. The paper towel material should hold the filter paper out against the barrel sides and make a good seal when it gets wet. Fill the barrel with the ink extract and squeeze it through the filter into another container.
The filtered extract is way too thin to make good ink. You must concentrate it. I pour the extract into saucers in my food dehydrator and set the heat to 135 degrees F. In a few hours, the ink is ready. If you don't have a dehydrator, you can use your oven. Set the temperature to 130 to 150 and use a glass cake or pie pan to evaporate water from the extract. If you used green husks, there is sugar in the extract. The sugar can caramelize or burn if the heat is too high. If that happens, you will have to filter the finished ink and you will lose a lot that way. Properly done, you will have a rather thick black puddle in the middle of a dry ring of solidified dye.
Put on your rubber glove and, with a finger, rub the liquid around on the dry ring to dissolve it into the liquid again. Test your ink with pen and paper. Keep evaporating until the ink is a little too dark for your liking. You will be adding alcohol to it later and that will thin it and make it lighter.
Use the calibrated syringe to transfer the ink to your ink bottle. Write down how much you have.
Now, you have to figure out how much preservative to add. I make my finished ink 10% ethanol by volume. Why? Because the original recipe does it that way and lasts for years without spoiling. I have read that 5% is adequate. If so, that would be better, as the alcohol promotes feathering and bleeding. A low concentration, however, is taking a chance that Acetobacter will invade your ink and turn it to vinegar. It's your choice. Here is the equation:
AX = B(C+X)
Where:
A = alcohol proof divided by 200. This is the alcohol concentration of your booze expressed as a decimal.
B = the alcohol concentration, expressed as a decimal, in your finished ink.
C = the volume, in ml, of raw ink you are starting with.
X = the volume, in ml, of booze you must add to the raw ink.
Solve for X.
Example: I just made 32 ml of ink. How much 151 proof rum must I add to it to give me ink that is 10% alcohol?
A = 151 divided by 200 = .755
.755X = .1(32+X)
Multiply by 10 on both sides:
7.55X = 32+X
Subtract X from both sides:
6.55X = 32
X = 4.88 ml of rum
Additives:
You can make black ink from the brown version by reacting it with iron. You use clean, rust-free iron or steel for this. The result is something similar to iron gall ink. It gets darker as it dries.
Pour the ink into a shallow dish or saucer. Put on a rubber glove and take a wad of steel wool about the size of a cotton ball and dip it into the ink and squeeze it dry. Dip and squeeze repeatedly until the ink is as dark as you want it. It is important not to let the ink stagnate in the steel wool. If you don't keep it moving, the reaction forms a black pigment that will settle out. If there is enough of this pigment in the ink, it will bridge up in your pen's nib slit and clog it. If you stop to test the ink with pen and paper and then want to make the ink still darker, rinse the steel wool out with distilled water and then continue the dip-squeeze routine. Be careful of this ink; it will leave a deep purple-black stain in a porcelain sink. During the blackening process, the ink becomes frothy and an odor becomes evident. This odor is not putrid and not fetid, but it is definitely biological smelling. The odor dissipates in time. No worries about your letters carrying a pong.
Adding gum Arabic to the ink will make it write dryer. It also destroys its water resistance.
SterilInk from Tryphon did not prevent my ink from growing SITB, even when I used a double or triple dose.
Ink Safe from Tryphon did not prevent my ink from growing SITB, either. It did, however, increase the flow through the nib. On certain hard-surfaced papers, this gave dark borders to the lines and greatly increased the writing's contrast.
Experiments with copper show that it can inhibit bacterial growth. I tried a coil of bare copper wire in a bottle of walnut ink for several months. It did not develop SITB in that time, while a single control did. I have not done the more extensive testing needed to draw a conclusion from this. I also don't know if the ink reacts with the copper in a similar fashion to iron. More testing is needed in this area.
In the time since I wrote the above article, I have made a few more observations:
SITB prevention: If you use alcohol, use ethyl alcohol. Isopropyl will make the ink feather and bleed twice as badly as ethyl. Methyl or wood alcohol makes the ink feather and bleed so badly it is not worth considering. Another option would be to use mouthwash. I have not tried this. Your ink should have a fresh, walnut odor. If it begins to smell like an old forgotten pile of sweat socks, throw it out. Bacteria have invaded and you will never be able to remove that smell.
If you let your husks rot over the winter, molds and microbes will use up the sugar present and permit you to dehydrate the ink to crystalline form. Otherwise, the removal of all the water will leave a puddle of a tar-like concentrate. It is interesting that two forms of crystals form in the evaporating ink – some square and some needle shaped. I don't have the patience to sort them out to see what each fraction does.
Filtering: If you want to use the ink in a fountain pen (and I have), the described method of filtration is not good enough. If I want to use the ink this way, I pass the ink through a filter designed for a respirator. These are fine enough to remove pollen from the air. The filters I buy are available in hardware stores and consist of a paper filter element mounted on a circular plastic ring. There is a mouthpiece that looks like the ones used on a skin-diver's snorkel. I use hot melt glue to mount a small funnel to the mouthpiece.
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Originally Posted by Marsilius
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