You know when you've simmered down your Confusa tea, it has that sludgy stuff.

Is that worth keeping, or is there no loss from discarding it?

Put it to one side, and process it separately if you really want to find out one way or the other.

I've heard contradictory information about the degree of losses incurred due to removing tannin sludge from bark tea.

I remove the sludge when I make teas with mimosa. After simmering, I leave it in the fridge overnight, after which it all settles to the bottom and sticks to the container. I still run it through a cottonball to be sure.

I doubt there's any loss in potency, but in my opinion it's worth not having to drink stomach shrapnel even if there is. My tea seems plenty potent anyway.

Cheers.

When I make brews for oral consumption, I separate the sludge from the liquid, put it in a pan, add water and vinegar and simmer it for 10 minutes. Then filter out the solids and boil the liquid down.

The resulting liquid is active and can be combined with the rest of the brew.

The dilution / simmer / filtering / boiling down sequence can be repeated, but probably not worth doing it more than twice.

If that's too much work for the amount of plant material brewed, you can put the sludge in a jar every time you brew, and do the above procedure when you have more sludge to process.