This may seem like a straightforward question with a straightforward answer, but we urge you to read the rest of this webpage before making any conclusions about whether or not this is the answer you're looking for.

I would argue that it may not be the best question to ask. At least, not the best first, nor only question to ask. It is certainly an important and relevant question. But it only tells a small piece of a larger puzzle, and many companies will lie when asked this question.

Questions like this are inevitable and present companies with a choice, either provide an answer that may be too complex, potentially frustrating consumers, or simply provide an impressively large number. It is not uncommon for companies to sacrifice ethics in exchange for superior marketing status.

If you find yourself reading this, you are probably a conscious and carefully discerning consumer. Perhaps even a total mushroom nerd! Whichever the case, in this article we will introduce a set of preliminary variables to be optimized for best tincture-making practices. We'll also go over accredited lab data that quantifies certain water soluble constituents in our mushroom tinctures.

Therapeutic fungi is a rapidly developing field with ever increasing consumer interest. Our goal is to answer all of your questions while also bringing forth some big areas of new learning.

Let’s begin with some general information about the chemistry at play while making a mushroom tincture...

Here is a table that shows the compounds we’re after in our mushroom tinctures. The goal in making an effective tincture is to “pull,” or extract, the medicinal compounds out of the plant or mushroom being extracted before straining away the cellular junk / chitinous cell walls and discarding them.

Note that this table is an extreme oversimplification of the solubility of these classes of mushroom compounds. Technically speaking, it is not so black and white, and there are metrics that govern the use of verbiage surrounding solubility in a piece of academic literature:

• Insoluble - less than 1 gram dissolves in a liter
• Slightly soluble - 1-10 grams dissolves in a liter
• Sparingly soluble - 10-30 grams dissolves in a liter
• Soluble - more than 30 grams dissolves in a liter

Let’s focus on the hot water extract... This is the meat and potatoes of your tincture. Performing a hot water extraction is pretty straightforward - you brew it. Ideally, you’ll simmer the mushrooms for several days straight, stirring regularly, in distilled water.

Here at Birch Boys, we have various tincture machines equipped with water circulation pumps and temperature controllers, which help when making tinctures in large or commercial volumes. We set the temperature to 178 degrees Fahrenheit and allow the ground mushrooms to steep for a minimum of 72 hours, with steady circulation of the water.

It's important to understand that simply using a greater weight of mushrooms per tincture will only make the tincture better if, and only if, all other variables are optimized. In other words, if you aren't a competent tincture maker, you can use as great a weight of dry matter as you desire, but your tinctures will still be weak when scrutinized by accredited 3rd party labs. Here is a list of non-obvious questions worth also asking, or at least thinking about, to determine or compare quality:

Then we of course must consider everything that contributes to the quality of the mushroom fruiting body, or specimen, itself. Even if we assume the tincture-maker is competent, One should still ask, does the raw material itself possess the medicine they aim to extract from it?

At Birch Boys, we are almost entirely vertically integrated - meaning that we source our raw materials and manufacture our products internally. When a company is not able to control all of these variables due to the need for various suppliers and co packers, or when a company is horizontally integrated, as are most of our competitors, quality is inevitably lost and/or obscured at each stage.

The sad thing is that when you ask a company for answers to some of these questions about their own branded products, more often than not, they don't actually know the answer, or are relying on an answer given to them by some other party.

To some extent, the best decisions we can make as consumers are informed leaps of faith. Rely on your gut instincts as well as doing your own learning. A few questions to ponder on this note - Do you trust the figure of mushroom weight that was put on the label by a huge corporatized company? Have you called and spoken with an educated staff member? Are the methods transparent?

Is there really any informed oversight? It's up to each of us as customers.

And it's up to us - the companies - to build trust through transparency, as I aim to with this.

Chaga’s yield of water soluble constituents is about 20%.

In other words, if you were to take 100 grams of ground chaga, then brew it in distilled water for 72 hours at 188 degrees fahrenheit, then carefully strain away the solid waste (spent chaga) from your now-black solution, then dry/evaporate all of the water away, you would yield about 20 grams of readily soluble shiny black powder. Or as we like to call it, ChagaNOW!

If you were to use 200 grams of chaga, you’d get about 40 grams ChagaNOW. You’d get close to 20% nearly every time. Each mushroom has its own relatively consistent yield of mushroom to mushroom-extract-powder in this way. Later I will list them each, but before that-

What is it that we are actually yielding? What the heck are these 20 grams? Vitamins? Minerals? Polysaccharides? Melanins? Sugars? Seriously, what is this chaga extract powder?

Until recently, all that we were able to conclude is that we had yielded 20g of soluble constituents from wild Chaga. Whatever compounds they may be has never been perfectly clears, but what has remained clear, from repeating this process over and over, is that from batch to batch and from one piece of chaga to the next, the composition of the 20 grams is always more or less the same. It produces a consistent yield with similar physical traits, properties, and chracteristics.

This was a revelation for me - Mushroom extract powders, if made correctly, are in and of themselves, a relatively consistent medium representing the entire spectrum of water soluble constituents - in their maximum natural concentrations. Mushroom extract powders are something we can now make in-house, and they are the closest thing we have to a perfect standard to be properly analyzed in a lab. Mushroom extract powders are in fact brilliant.

Sadly, so is the iron grip that Chinese suppliers have on the entire mushroom extract industry. They have a tight grip on basically every industry. It feels like a bit of a contradiction to call extract powders brilliant when the majority of mushroom extract powders I see for sale are blatant frauds, fakes, or at best, gimmicky products that are cut with heavy amounts of filler material. Do not confuse what I call an extract powder with cheap Chinese garbage.

When you possess a genuine quality mushroom extract powder, you possess a perfectly concentrated hot water extract. It's just that the water has been evaporated away, so it is as potent and pure as it can possibly be. This powder was used as a key reference material to develop the optimal hot water extract formulation of our tinctures.

Through a culmination of hard work, 3rd party lab research and development expenditures, and internal experiments, we were able to analyze the presence of certain types of compounds contained in samples of our concentrated hot water extracts (aka - extract powders) from various mushrooms, and this data allowed us to work backward and formulate a mushroom weight to water ratio that is deliberate, for our tincture potency and serving sizes.

Here are the results of this work, and the yields of water soluble constituents for each mushroom.

We decided to stick with a standard mushroom to water ratio for all tincture batches, or the same ratio for every mushroom species, for the sake of a smooth and consistent workflow. We looked at the combined data from all mushroom species tested in order to choose a generally efficacious serving of the compounds we are able to quantify in our tinctures.

Specifically, that means one batch of tincture = 2 kilograms of mushrooms, brewed for 3 days, in distilled water, concentrated down to 5 gallons upon straining away the mushrooms used. These 5 gallons serve as the hot water portion of 160 4oz tincture bottles, or 4800 total servings.

Each 4oz tincture bottle is derived from 12,500mg of the mushroom species indicated, and will predictably contain the soluble constituents from approximately 417mg of that mushroom in every 4ml serving.

It would be naive to say that a tincture contains 12,500mg of the mushroom used to make it. The tincture contains only the soluble compounds derived from the 12,500mg of the mushroom used to make it.

View the full PDF of our Certificates of Analyses from Medallion Labs by clicking the button below.

We now know, or at least have data to suggest, that the hot water extraction of Turkey Tail is primarily made up of polysaccharides (56%). (If the math is unclear, note that beta glucans are indeed a form of polysaccharides). Given rigorous Japanese clinical data that has already been established on Polysaccharide Krestin (PSK) and Polysaccharide Peptide (PSP) derived from Turkey Tail mushrooms (used in cancer treatments) there may be a serious opportunity to look at this more closely and yield profound knowledge for self-healing. Further work here could seriously advance the naturopathic 'good fight' because there is likely a way to determine how many of these polysaccharides are PSK and/or PSP. That information would be very useful for anyone battling cancer or in the midst of life-enduring adjuvant therapy.

How ironic is that our top selling tinctures are Chaga and Lion's Mane?

We now have data to suggest that our best selling two mushroom extracts, Chaga and Lion's Mane, are the very two that contain the largest amount of unidentified water soluble constituents. 80% of the water soluble components of Chaga and 86% of the water soluble components of Lion's mane remain a mystery to us.

This is interesting. If you really think about it, maybe it's not so ironic after all...

There are some studies on beta glucan dosage, but beta glucans are just a category of compounds (a subcategory of polysaccharides), so it is not easy to tell which tincture is best based on unspecified beta glucan content alone. After all, certain beta glucans perform certain functions, and from the studies we've looked at, humans would ideally strive to consume several hundred milligrams of beta glucan per day to experience any of the noteworthy positive benefits they are associated with.

This is not to say that there aren't enough beta glucans in our tinctures to be helpful, but honestly, we cannot guarantee what these beta glucans are doing, nor whether or not any serving size of beta glucan is enough to perform a specific function or elicit specific benefits.

The one thing we've confirmed in this analysis is that there is so much we don't know.

This underscores a few points I’d like to make as they pertain to Birch Boys tinctures. You can use more than the suggested serving size on the bottle. We suggest not doing so with Chaga, but we encourage you to responsibly experiment with dosage on the other mushrooms. After all, this is the way that tinctures were discovered and used, by our ancestors, countless years ago.

If you don’t feel any positive effects (nor negative effects), feel free to try using more than 4ml per day. Increasing by only 1mL per week to ensure you aren’t surpassing what you need to hastily. Wondering what the effects are? Read our Mushroom Tincture Guide.

You can also safely take all of our mushroom tinctures simultaneously (read more about alcohol content in mushroom tinctures here). We encourage you to develop your own chosen regimen of specific mushroom tinctures to be used as a daily supplement based on your own health goals, your own understanding, and your own experience with these fungi.

And let me just say… Beta glucans are not the end-all be-all.

The only reason beta glucans have become the gold standard of quality indicator testing is because they are the only constituent for which commercial testing services are readily available. In addition to this, there are several types of beta glucan - Fungal Beta Glucan or (1,3)(1,6) β-glucan, and starch beta glucan, or (1,3)(1,4) β-glucan. While both are Beta Glucan, they are not the same in terms of health benefits, with Mushroom Beta Glucan having a natural triple helix stucture that constibutes greatly to its immunomodulatory and anticancer properties. Many companies will test for overall beta glucan (both starch and mushroom derived), instead of specifically testing for (1,3)(1,6) β-glucan. This is done to obscure the fact that an immense amount of starch filler remains in their end product. All of our testing at Birch Boys has been done on (1,3)(1,6) β-glucan, and our products contain zero starch or filler.

This does not mean beta glucans are the most important thing present. We see it much differently. We don’t necessarily think beta glucan is all that relevant, relatively speaking, when we consider hundreds (if not thousands) of studies that have been performed on other more complex constituents within medicinal mushrooms. Many of these constituents are the alcohol soluble compounds, which we have not even discussed in this article.

Up Next: Up Next: The Science of Mushroom Tincture-Making Part 2. Ethanol Extracts & Powerful Triterpenes. To be discussed at a later date.

If you were to ask Birch Boys, triterpenes are (by far) the most incredible active ingredients in medicinal mushrooms. They are not water soluble, nor are there any affordable quantification services that we have been able to find, but we desperately want to figure out how many triterpenes are actually present in our products. We just need to figure out how.

We've spoken to various consultants and it seems that custom method development work will be required for general quantification of total triterpenes in each mushroom species. This would be extremely expensive, unless you have a talented chemist, specialized equipment, and laboratory instruments in your back pocket.

To any bright minded, competent chemist out there looking to develop a successful enterprise - I would urge you to start a mushroom-focused quality indicator laboratory and offer triterpene quantification services. This will be big business. Let's figure it out together!

... To be continued.