Making Homemade Penicillin

Step 1. Isolating Penicillin Bacteria

Put piece of bread or citrus fruit in container in a dark place at 70 degrees F. It should be in a closed (but not airtight) container. Add a few drops of water to the container and leave all but one corner closed to keep in moisture.

It can take weeks for the mold to start growing. Hopefully you are making this in advance of needing it.

The bread or fruit will start getting a gray mold. This mold will eventually turn a bluish-green color. This is the mold that you want for making penicillin!

*You’ll want to use homemade bread.

Step 2. Making a Host Culture for the Penicillin to Grow On

The greenish-blue mold you grew contains penicillin.

“Natural penicillin” derived directly from mold is very sensitive to stomach acid. If you drink it as a tea, it will be destroyed before it makes it to your bloodstream. The only way to make this penicillin work is it to inject it and that is not good at this stage because of the impurity and is not recommended!. To get the benefits of penicillin from mold, it has to be further cultured.

You need to re-culture the penicillin. This step also ensures that you are only getting penicillin bacteria and not salmonella.

Re-Culturing Penicillin

Thinly slice 200 grams of unpeeled potatoes.
Put the potatoes into a 1 liter mason jar and fill with distilled water. Screw on the lid tightly. Put the entire jar into a pot of boiling water. Boil for 30 minutes.
Once it cools a bit, open the jar. Strain the contents through a cheesecloth . Catch the liquid! This is what that you need.
Add 20g of glucose (dextrose) to the broth. If you don’t have glucose, plain sugar will work.
.Add 20g of agar to the broth. If you don’t have agar, then plain gelatin (not Jello) will work. Note that the agar isn’t going to completely dissolve.
Add distilled water until the total volume is 1 liter.
Pour the broth into wide, flat jars with a sealable lid. Basically, anything that could work as a petri dish. If you actually have petri dishes, use them.
Cover the dishes immediately to prevent microbes from the air from getting into them.

Step 3. Streaking Your “Petri Dish”

Now it is time to move your penicillin mold spores to your “petri dishes” that have the potato broth in them.

There is a very specific method that scientists use for growing cultures. It is called “streaking.”

Get a thin piece of wire. Bend the tip into an oval shape.
Sterilize the tip of the wire in a flame. It should be red hot.
Dip the hot wire into the potato broth to cool it down (so the heat doesn’t kill your penicillin spores).
Now touch the wire tip to the greenish-blue penicillin mold.
Make three lines on your petri dish. This is where the colonies of penicillin will start growing.

Step 4: Let Your Penicillin Grow

Keeping it covered, let the penicillin grow in your DIY petri dishes for about a week.

Penicillin is a yellow color. However, other species of bacteria can also be yellow, so it is hard to tell for sure that you got penicillin without a trained eye and a microscope.

Step 5: Fermenting Your Penicillin

Here is where things get a bit complicated. You need to ferment your penicillin spores so they reproduce in huge numbers. Otherwise, it will be like trying to put out a forest fire with a bucket of water.

Most websites tell you to get a bunch of ingredients like potassium monophosphate and sodium nitrate. That method does works – but I doubt you will find those things laying around when SHTF.

Here is a simple method of fermenting penicillin.

Supplies

Erlenmeyer flask

(at least 500ml in size)

10g

These ingredients are all available on Amazon.

Instructions

Sterilize the flask in the oven at 315 degrees F for one hour.
Put the glucose, yeast, citric acid, milk powder, and sea salt into your graduated cylinder.
Fill the cylinder with water until it reaches the 100ml mark.
Pour the contents into your flask.
Put the lid on and shake until the contents are dissolved.
Add your penicillin cultures to the flask. Make sure you are using sterile methods, such as using a sterilized metal loop to add the cultures!
Cover the flask with sterilized aluminum foil. This will keep unwanted microbes out of the flask while still allowing for air flow.
Let the flask sit for at least 7 days but no longer than 14 days.Here is what penicillin looks like growing in a glass flask.

Here is what penicillin looks like growing in a glass flask.

Step 6: Extracting the Penicillin

After about a week, you have got fermented penicillin in the flask. You've got to get out all of the other ingredients before you can use it though.

Supplies

Coffee filters

PH Tester

Hydrochloric acid

Instructions

There are going to be solid parts in the liquid. You need to separate these from the liquid. The liquid is the part which contains the penicillin, so you want to hang on to it!
Strain the penicillin liquid through a coffee filter or sterilized cheesecloth. Catch the liquid in a sterile container.
Now you need to adjust the pH of the penicillin. Add a drop of hydrochloric acid and then test the pH. It will probably be a pH of around 5 when you start. Keep adding drops and testing until you get a pH of 2.2.

In theory, you could use this extracted penicillin now. However, the penicillin is very unstable.

You’d have to use it right away. Considering that most infections need multiple rounds of antibiotics to treat, your whole efforts would be for nothing.

Thus, you have to do the fairly complicated and scientific step of further extracting the penicillin.

Step 7: Further Extraction

Ethyl acetate is used to completely extract pure penicillin. The penicillin dissolves into the ethyl acetate. Then the ethyl can be evaporated, leaving you with pure penicillin.

Supplies

Separator funnel

Ethyl Acetate

Potassium Acetate

Instructions

Chill ethyl acetate in a freezer.
Mix the cold ethyl acetate and penicillin liquid in a separator funnel.
Shake them together for 30 seconds, then allow them to separate again. The ethyl acetate will sink to the bottom.
Open the separator funnel and allow just the ethyl acetate to slowly drip out into a sterile collection container (a mason jar works for this).
Now add potassium acetate to the ethyl acetate. You’ll need about 1g of potassium acetate for each 100ml of solution you have.
Leave the solution uncovered in a ventilated area. The ethyl will evaporate, leaving behind penicillin.

You’ll note that we started with about 100ml of fermentation. From that amount, you’ll probably only get about 100mg of penicillin.