yeah, that's just the essentials in the peppermint though, what they're talking about is a grocery store-bought peppermint extract that uses pure ethanol to extract flavors from the peppermint plant...usually, that alcohol is cooked off of your food when you actually use it to cook...but if you just drink the stuff without using it to cook, you actually ingest the alcohol...the crystals thing you're talking about sounds like just essentials from the plant, god knows how that's extracted, probably bulk-extracted with alcohol, and then they probably let the alcohol evaporate off and then probably let the water evaporate off that's left behind....i imagine that would make crystals since plants do store sugars, which do crystallize under certain conditions, much like making rock candy