How Many Milligrams of Lion's Mane Are You Actually Taking?
A dropper is not a dose until you know what is dissolved in it.
·4 min read
Ask how much lion's mane someone takes and the answer is usually "a dropper, twice a day". That is a volume, not a quantity. Two droppers from two different bottles can differ by a factor of four in the amount of dried mushroom they carry, and nothing on the outside of either bottle makes that obvious.
Part of the confusion comes from the literature. Most of the published work on Hericium erinaceus used powdered material in capsules, and quotes intakes in grams of powder per day. Those figures do not transfer cleanly to a tincture, which is a liquid extract at an entirely different concentration, and we are not going to pretend they do, or attach an outcome to a number. What we can do is make the arithmetic legible, so that whatever you decide, you know what you are actually holding.
It takes three lines. First, find the dried fruiting body weight and the bottle volume; for us, 13.2 g in 30 ml. Second, convert to milligrams and divide: 13,200 mg ÷ 30 ml = 440 mg of dried mushroom per millilitre. Third, apply your dropper volume; a standard glass pipette draws about 1 ml when full, so a full dropper of ours carries roughly 440 mg of dried fruiting body.
Run the same three lines on a 1:5 extract and the result is close to 200 mg per millilitre. Not wrong, not dishonest, simply less concentrated, and requiring more than twice the liquid to arrive at the same weight. That is the entire practical meaning of an extraction ratio: how much bottle you have to get through.
Two things to watch. If a label gives no dried fruiting body weight at all, the calculation cannot be done and you are being asked to take the strength on trust. And if it advertises a large "equivalent to" figure, check whether that is dried weight or a fresh-weight back-calculation; the two are not comparable, and we set out why in our guide to tincture strength.
Use our free UK mushroom tincture ratio calculator to check your current bottle against these three lines, or read the figures behind Lion's Mane, The Thinker.
Shrooma tinctures are food supplements and are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.