I think I'll start a batch of dye and let it stand through the winter with all my dried black walnut hulls. No super cold weather here but perhaps just the time soaking will do the trick. Boiling them for three days in a row with overnight cooling didn't do much. Thanks for the idea. I'll round up one of those 7-gallon buckets from the hardware store and get it going.
Hey Marshal, if you have a big freezer that may work too if you want to get a little more extreme temp swings. I really think the freezing and thaw cycles make a huge difference which is why I'm curious to check this second batch from the same walnuts sitting out by my shop now. What has really made the best walnut stain with all my experimenting was as I explained before when I basically did nothing and let mother nature do all the work but I'm thinking the freeze and thaw is going to make a stronger batch than just sitting because even boiling husks never got the strength of stain I'm getting the way I do it now.
I did that by gathering the green walnuts in used BLACK five gallon oil buckets (cleaned very well obviously) so they gather heat from the sun in the winter. Why black buckets? I had two out the first time one black and one white and would notice the black bucket would thaw during borderline freezing temps during winter days. This way with Kentucky weather I get a lot of freezing and thawing cycles.
After all our temp swings here in Kentucky is one of the things that help bourbon age in the barrels so well here by working the spirits in and out of the charred oak barrels. I had went through all kinds of work making big tea bags of the green walnut husks and boiling them and everything and never had these kind of results.
I had a couple buckets of walnuts that I had not gotten the time to do anything with by the time they were already turning brown and had already gathered some rain water. At that point it dawned on me hey that is how Whisky gets its color from the charred oak barrels so I just decided to leave them for the winter and see what happened. The results were very pleasing and I've been doing it like that for the last three years now.
Another thing is your dealing with natural clean rain water to start so there are no minerals and in the case of city water it has chlorine and all kinds of other things added.