What “1:3 Dual Extract” Actually Means
A ratio means the same thing wherever you read it. An adjective means whatever the brand printing it wants.
·4 min read
Tincture labels are full of numbers that don't explain themselves. 1:3 is one of them, and it's worth unpacking, because it's the single figure that tells you how concentrated a tincture actually is, and because most brands quietly choose not to print it at all.
The ratio describes extract strength: how many parts of dried fruiting body went into how many parts of finished liquid. The market norm for mushroom tinctures is 1:5: one part dried mushroom to five parts liquid. Ours is 1:3. That's not a marginal difference; it means our tinctures carry roughly two-thirds more fruiting-body material per millilitre than a standard 1:5 product, for the same volume in the bottle.
Getting there costs something at every stage. A 1:3 extraction takes longer to draw fully from the same mass of mushroom, yields a smaller volume of finished tincture from a given harvest, and is simply more expensive to produce than diluting further. It would be easy to stretch a batch of dried Lion's Mane or Reishi into more bottles at 1:5. We don't, because a tincture stretched that far starts to resemble mushroom-flavoured water more than a properly loaded extract.
The other number worth understanding is the "dual" part. A single-solvent extraction, water alone, or alcohol alone, only ever draws out half of what a mushroom has to offer. Water pulls the polysaccharides, including beta-glucans, into solution. Alcohol is what liberates the triterpenes, the bitter, lipid-soluble compounds responsible for Reishi's characteristic taste and Chaga's dense, mineral edge. Neither solvent does the other's job. So our specialist UK extraction partner runs both processes separately and slowly, then recombines them at a calibrated ratio, batch by batch, to our written specification.
We print 1:3 on the label because we think a number you can compare is more honest than an adjective you can't. "Potent," "concentrated" and "premium" mean whatever the brand printing them wants them to mean. A ratio means the same thing wherever you read it, on any bottle, from any maker willing to print it.
If you'd like to test that, use our free UK mushroom tincture ratio calculator to check your current bottle: enter its volume, price and dried fruiting body weight, and it will return the true ratio and the dried milligrams per millilitre behind it.
Shrooma tinctures are food supplements and are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.