Cost Per Bottle Is the Wrong Number
Price is easy to read. Value takes two divisions and about thirty seconds.
·4 min read
Shelf price is the number everyone compares, because it is the only one printed large enough to compare. It is also the number that tells you least. A tincture is not a single object; it is a volume of liquid holding some quantity of dried mushroom. Two bottles at the same price can differ several-fold in both.
The trap is well worn. A 50 ml bottle at £22 looks like better value than a 30 ml bottle at £25: more liquid, less money. But if the first holds 6 g of dried fruiting body and the second holds 13.2 g, the cheaper bottle is carrying 120 mg of mushroom per millilitre against 440 mg. You are paying less, and getting roughly a third as much per drop. Whether that is good value depends entirely on how many drops you have to take to arrive at the same place.
Two divisions settle it. The first is price divided by volume: £25 over 30 ml is £0.83 per millilitre. The second is dried weight divided by price: 13,200 mg over £25 is 528 mg of dried mushroom per pound spent. The first tells you what the liquid costs. The second tells you what the mushroom costs, and the second is the one that survives comparison across bottle sizes.
Run both on any two bottles and the ranking often inverts. The reason it inverts is not that anyone is cheating; it is that dried fruiting body is the most expensive input in the bottle, and the easiest one to quietly reduce. Alcohol and water are cheap. Volume is cheap. Mushroom is not.
Which is also why so few labels give you the figure you need. If a bottle states its volume and its price but not its dried fruiting body weight, the second division is impossible and you are left comparing liquid. That absence is itself information.
We have put the arithmetic into a free UK mushroom tincture ratio and value calculator, so you can check your current bottle against any other in about thirty seconds. We also set out the reasoning at greater length in our guide to reading tincture strength. Our own figures, 13.2 g dried per 30 ml, £25.00, £0.83 per millilitre, are on the page and on the label, and they are there to be checked. You can see the full range in The Range.
Shrooma tinctures are food supplements and are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.