Medicinal mushroom tinctures are all the rage right now, and with good reason - they are easy to make and are a great way to get mushrooms into our bodies on a daily basis. While we prefer to eat mushrooms, many medicinal mushrooms are not really all that yummy. So… we turn them into tincture which we add to coffee and tea. After several years of making double extraction methods using medicinal mushrooms, our techniques have regularly evolved. In the last few months however, they have really changed pretty dramatically. The biggest factor driving the changes in my tincture recipe are the medicinal mushrooms themselves. We want to get more mushrooms into our bodies, and therefore into our tinctures. This definitely means just eating more of the mushrooms, in our food. We can eat them fresh or dehydrate them and cook them into food later. But, for medicinal mushrooms like turkey tail, chaga, reishi, artists conk, red-belted polypore, birch polypore and similar species, this is untenable because they just don’t taste good.

We have definitely started using extract powders a lot more as they are an easy way to add these species to drinks and food and don’t taste too bad. But of course, powdered extracts are quite difficult to make, so we buy them. My hands-down favorite brand is Hamilton’s Extracts. For more information in regards to Supplier of shiitake mushroom extract powder for pharmaceutical Ingredients take a look at the web page. These powders really allow us to easily push more medicinal mushrooms right into our bodies. This desire for more mushrooms is partly a rising-tide sort of thing. The more we learn, the more we want to get more grams of mushrooms into our bellies, more times a day, more days a week. Daily mushroom consumption seems to be an entirely positive thing. Furthermore, I want to get some variety as different mushrooms bring different benefits. I try to consume several different species each day. While I have written extensively in our how to make mushroom extracts article about how to make your own tincture, I question my own methods! Why? I did the math.

It looks something like this: 50g of mushrooms makes a double extraction tincture that is approximately 1200ml when complete… 300 ml of alcohol and 900 ml of H20. I was able to increase that a bit, but not much. You just cannot put more mushrooms into the jar and cover them with alcohol. 50g of mushrooms for 1200ml of tincture is a 1:24 ratio of mushrooms to tincture, or approximately 4%. Keep in mind there are a lot of factors and this is just an estimate. This leaves way too much water! But, you can boil the water down until it is the right amount of water. Our friend Dr Dave (Carbondale Acupuncture Center) uses this technique which hails from his traditional Chinese medicine background . We have erred on the side of caution and tried not to boil our h20, but, who knows? It is a traditional technique and some modern science indicates the boiling is OK too.

This desire for more mushrooms per ml is only heightened by Christopher Hobbs and his new book Medicinal Mushrooms. Fantastic book! He really advocates for actually consuming the entire fruiting body, even of bitter non-gourmet mushrooms. He has several recipes, techniques and tips to help you do so. But, we still like tincture for easy daily consumption. Mentally, all this came to a head when I was taking a class by the medicinal mushroom duo of Tradd Cotter and Robert Rodgers. I really trust these two individuals and their opinions on this matter. They did some more math during the class, demonstrating that it just doesn’t make sense. If I want to consume 50g of mushrooms, I would have to drink a cup or two of tincture potentially… The tincture is 25% alcohol - way too much booze. Fortunately, they provided a solution which really makes sense. Before Continuing, here is a bit of a math breakdown and some of the challenges.