Glass jars each containing a different mushroom tincture with the source mushroom on the table in front of the tictures

The Science of Mushroom Tincture Making
Part 1: Hot Water Extraction

How many milligrams of mushrooms are in each tincture?

People often ask how much mushroom goes into one tincture. Each Birch Boys tincture contains 12,500 mg (dried) of the featured mushroom — equivalent to about 417 mg per serving.

This might seem like a simple question with a simple answer — but it’s not.

“How many milligrams go into a tincture?” only tells part of the story. In fact, it’s one of the most misleading questions in the mushroom industry, since many brands inflate or misrepresent their numbers.

At Birch Boys, we believe in transparency over marketing hype. So instead of giving you a flashy figure, we’ll explain how to evaluate tincture quality based on real science — including extraction ratios, lab-verified data, and the variables that truly matter for potency.

Solubility

A compound is soluble if it dissolves easily in a given solvent, and insoluble if it does not.Examples: Table salt and sugar are soluble in water. Silver is insoluble in water under normal conditions.

A solvent is the liquid that dissolves a compound. In tincture making, the solvents used are water and ethanol. The type and quality of both solvents are incredibly important to the outcome of your extract.

Water being distilled

What type of water is best for hot water extraction?

Distilled or deionized water works best.Tap, spring, and natural waters all contain minerals like calcium and magnesium that can interfere with extraction. Softened water isn’t ideal either, since it just swaps those minerals for sodium or potassium. When water already has minerals or softeners in it, there’s less room to pull compounds from the mushroom. Starting with pure water gives your extraction the most room to work.

Organic Cane Alcohol for Tinctures

What is the best alcohol to use for making tinctures?

The best alcohol for tincture making is 190-proof (95%) organic cane alcohol. Everclear, which is also 190-proof, works too, while regular vodka (around 80 proof or 40% alcohol) is too weak. A common misconception is that soaking Chaga or other mushrooms in vodka and water creates a double extraction. It doesn’t. Vodka lacks the strength to pull alcohol-soluble compounds, and without a hot water process, you lose the water-soluble ones. Some tinctures are alcohol-only, but Birch Boys tinctures are true double extracts made by combining separate hot water and alcohol extractions to capture the full range of beneficial compounds.

Beneficial Mushroom Compounds - Water Soluble and Ethanol Soluble

This table shows the main compounds targeted in our tinctures. The goal of extraction is to pull these beneficial compounds from the mushroom while discarding the chitinous (cell wall) material that the body can’t digest.

Water-Soluble Mushroom Compounds Ethanol-Soluble Mushroom Compounds

Polysaccharides (including beta glucans)

Triterpenes
  • Vitamins and minerals

Sterols
  • Polyphenols

Lignin

Note: This table is a simplified overview of mushroom compound solubility. In reality, solubility exists on a spectrum and depends on multiple factors. The general guidelines below describe how solubility is classified in scientific 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

Hot Water Extraction - Basic Process

Let’s focus on the hot water extraction. This is the core of any tincture. The process is simple — you brew it. Ideally, the mushrooms are simmered for several days in distilled water, with regular stirring to keep everything moving.

At Birch Boys, we use specialized tincture machines with water circulation pumps and temperature controllers. This setup helps us maintain precision for large or commercial batches. The temperature is kept at 178°F, and the ground mushrooms steep for a minimum of 72 hours with continuous water movement.

Questions to Ask When Comparing Mushroom Tinctures

Using more mushrooms in a tincture doesn’t automatically make it stronger. Potency depends on how well every variable is controlled — from solvent quality to extraction time. Without skill and precision, even a heavy mushroom load can produce a weak extract when tested in a lab.

Here are a few less obvious but important questions to consider when evaluating tincture quality:

The best water for extraction is distilled, deionized, or reverse osmosis filtered water. At Birch Boys, we use distilled water for the water portion of our tinctures to ensure maximum purity and extraction efficiency.

In herbal tincture making, gentle heat is often preferred to preserve delicate vitamins and minerals. Mushroom tinctures are different. Fungal cell walls are made of chitin, which is much tougher than plant cellulose, so higher heat is essential to break them down and release beneficial compounds like beta glucans, polysaccharides, and polyphenols. At Birch Boys, we perform the hot water extraction at 178°F for 72 hours to achieve optimal compound release.

There are many ways to speed up extraction, such as grinding mushrooms to increase surface area, but nothing replaces time. Our hot water extracts are brewed for a minimum of 72 hours (three full days) to ensure complete extraction of water-soluble compounds.

After brewing, the mushrooms still hold a small amount of extract-rich liquid. Pressing them helps recover that final, highly concentrated portion. Though small in volume, it contains a dense concentration of active compounds that add significant potency to the finished tincture. We always press our mushrooms at Birch Boys to ensure nothing goes to waste.

And beyond process, it’s also worth considering the raw materials themselves:

If cultivated, ask what substrate was used, whether pesticides were applied, and if the grow is certified organic or audited. At Birch Boys, we sustainably wild-harvest our Chaga, Reishi, Turkey Tail, and Artist’s Conk. We source our Lion’s Mane and Maitake from USDA-certified organic growers in Minnesota who grow on hardwood.

If the mushrooms were never fully dried, their weight will be artificially higher, inflating the amount of mushroom per tincture. Poor or delayed drying can also lead to mold or bacterial growth, which alters the mushroom’s chemistry from the start. At Birch Boys, we promptly dry all specimens in a custom-built drying chamber to preserve quality and consistency.

Imported mushroom products often contain fillers like myceliated grain or non-mushroom material. The risk of fraud is higher with international sourcing, as the FDA has limited oversight outside the U.S. As a consumer, you should only trust certificates of analysis from ISO-accredited U.S. laboratories.If you think companies wouldn’t go as far as fabricating mushrooms, review published research on the authenticity of Chinese-supplied ginseng products — the same tactics apply to the mushroom industry. Limited regulation and cost-driven purchasing have allowed low-quality or fake materials to enter U.S. markets, even through major brands.Birch Boys sources the majority of our fungi from over 200,000 acres of leased forest in New York’s Adirondack Park, and supplements with mushrooms from USDA-certified organic American growers.

At Birch Boys, we’re almost entirely vertically integrated, meaning we source our own raw materials and manufacture our products in-house. Most companies can’t control every step because they rely on multiple suppliers and co-packers. This kind of horizontal integration, common in the supplement industry, often leads to gaps in traceability and lost quality at each stage.

The unfortunate truth is that when you ask many brands these same questions, they often don’t know the answers themselves. They may be relying on information passed along by a third party.

As consumers, our best decisions are often a mix of research and intuition. Ask yourself: Do you trust the mushroom weight listed on a label from a large corporate brand? Have you spoken with an informed staff member? Are their methods transparent?

Real oversight depends on accountability. It’s up to customers to ask, and up to companies like us to earn trust through transparency, which is exactly what we aim to do.

Check out Birch Boys Mushroom Tinctures

 

The Science of Mushroom Tincture Making
Part 1: Hot Water Extraction

Logic Behind Our Formulations

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.

Hot Water Extraction, Soluble Yields & their Makeup by Mushroom Species

Input (Mushroom and Weight) Output (Weight of soluble Yield) Makeup of Yielded Constituents

1 kg Chaga

200g soluble material
  • 3g are beta glucans - (1,3)(1,6) β-glucan
  • 9g are other unspecified polysaccharides
  • 29g are phenolic compounds (polyphenols).
  • 158g soluble material remains unidentified

1 kg Reishi

180g soluble material
  • 7g are beta glucans - (1,3)(1,6) β-glucan
  • 22g are other unspecified polysaccharides
  • 11g are phenolic compounds (polyphenols).
  • 140g soluble material remains unidentified

1 kg Lion's Mane

300g sluble material
  • 18 are beta glucan - (1,3)(1,6) β-glucan
  • 20g are other unspecified polyschharides
  • 4g are phenolic compounds (polyphenols).
  • 258g soluble material remains unidentified

1 kg Turkey Tail

180g soluble material

  • 67g are beta glucan - (1,3)(1,6) β-glucan
  • 33g are other unspecifed polysaccharides
  • 9g are phenolic compounds (polyphenols)
  • 141g soluble material remains unidentified

1 kg Maitake

250g soluble material
  • 95g are beta glucan - (1,3)(1,6) β-glucan
  • 31g are other unspecified polysaccharides
  • 124g soluble material remains unidentified

1 kg Artist Conk

200g soluble material
  • 40g are beta glucan - (1,3)(1,6) β-glucan
  • 44g are other unspecified polysaccharides
  • 112g soluble material remains unidentified

Constituent Analysis of Hot Water Extract Powders from Various Mushrooms

Mushroom Extract Powder Beta Glucan - (1,3)(1,6) β-glucan Other Polysaccharides Polyphenols Unknown

Chaga (Inonotus obliquus)

1.6%

4.4%

14%

80%

Reishi (Ganoderma tsugae)

4%

12%

6%

78%

Lion's Mane (Hericium erinaceus)

6%

7%

1%

86%

Turkey Tail (Trametes versicolor)

38%

18%

5%

39%

Maitake (Grifola frondosa)

38%

12%

N/A

50%

Artist Conk (Ganoderma applanatum)

19%

23%

N/A

58%

Click the tabs to view the analyses of Birch Boys mushroom tinctures

Birch Boys Chaga Tincture Supplement Facts
Birch Boys Lion's Mane Tincture Supplement Facts
Birch Boys Turkey Tail Supplement Facts
Birch Boys Maitake Supplement Facts
Birch Boys Artist's Conk Supplement Facts
Birch Boys Reishi Tincture Supplement Facts

Tincture Making Process and Batch Size for Hot Water Extract, Summarized

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.

 

COA: Test Results

Two Observations / Extremely Interesting Takeaways

1. Turkey Tail is mostly polysaccharides

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.

2. Our best sellers are what we know the least about

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...

Beyond the Beta Glucans...

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

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...