How to calculate the real strength of a mushroom tincture.

01. What an extraction ratio actually states

An extraction ratio describes a relationship between mushroom and finished liquid. Written 1:5, it means one part dried fruiting body to five parts finished tincture, by weight to volume, so one gram of dried mushroom for every five millilitres in the bottle. Written 1:3, it means one gram for every three millilitres.

The second number is the one that matters, and it works backwards from intuition: the lower it is, the more mushroom sits in each millilitre. A 1:3 is a denser extract than a 1:5, which is denser again than a 1:10. Anything above 1:5 is a thin tincture regardless of how the bottle is dressed.

A ratio is only meaningful if you know what it is a ratio of. One part fruiting body is not the same as one part mycelium-on-grain, which can be largely starch by weight. Same number, different substance.

02. Why we work in dried weight only

There is only one weight worth quoting on a tincture: the dried fruiting body that went into the bottle. It is the material that carries the compounds, it is measurable at the point of extraction, and it is the figure an extractor can be held to.

The rule is simple: compare dried grams per millilitre, nothing else. If a label will not give you a dried weight, that silence is itself an answer.

03. What “equivalent to” actually means

You will often see a tincture label quote a large number, 10,000 mg, sometimes more, followed by the words equivalent to. It is worth understanding what that phrase is doing.

It is almost never the amount of mushroom in the bottle. It is a back-calculation: the maker takes the dried mushroom they used and multiplies it by an assumed water content, arriving at the weight of fresh mushroom it would have been before drying. The bottle has not changed. Only the number has.

The multiplier is usually ten. Ten is a convenient figure, and for some species on some days it is roughly right. As a rule applied across a whole range, it is not.

Why dry-down varies by species

Mushrooms do not hold water equally. A young oyster or lion's mane is soft and highly hydrated, and loses a great deal of its weight in the dryer. Chaga is not a soft mushroom at all. It is a dense, woody sclerotium harvested hard, and it simply does not carry that volume of water to begin with. Reishi sits somewhere between, tough and corky, drying down far less dramatically than its softer relatives.

Apply a single ten-times multiplier to all of them and you flatter the dense ones considerably. The species that lose the least water gain the most from the arithmetic.

There is a second variable underneath it: what was dried in the first place. A figure derived from mycelium grown on grain includes the grain. The number can be entirely accurate and still describe something other than mushroom.

What we quote instead

We state dried fruiting body per bottle, and nothing else. Each 30ml bottle is made from 13.2g of dried fruiting body: 440mg in every millilitre. It is a smaller number than a fresh-weight equivalent, and it is the one we can stand behind, because it is what we weighed before extraction rather than what it might have weighed beforehand.

You can hold any label to the same test. Find the dried weight, divide it by the volume, and compare like with like. If a bottle quotes only a fresh-weight equivalent, the dried figure is still in there; it is the large number divided by whatever multiplier was chosen.

04. Our maths, shown in full

We would rather publish our own arithmetic than ask anyone to take a ratio on trust. Here is a 30ml bottle of Lion's Mane, The Thinker, worked through end to end.

Which is why we describe the range as 1:3 rather than 1:2.27, the specification we hold our extractor to is 1:3, and batches land at or above it. We would rather state the number we guarantee than the flattering number a single batch happens to hit.

Price works the same way. £25.00 across a 30ml bottle is £0.83 per millilitre, and per millilitre is the only honest way to compare a 30ml bottle against a 50ml one.

05. 1:3 against the 1:5 norm

The common shelf standard in the UK is 1:5. Put the two side by side on a like-for-like 30ml bottle and the difference is not rhetorical.

Figures for the 1:5 column are the arithmetic of the stated ratio, not a claim about any particular brand. Check the bottle in front of you. That is rather the point.

06. How to compare any bottle in four steps

1. 01

   Find the weight

   Look for dried mushroom per bottle. Dried weight is the only figure worth comparing. If no dried weight is given, that is itself an answer.

2. 02

   Check what was extracted

   Fruiting body, or mycelium grown on grain? A ratio quoted on grain-grown mycelium is not comparable to one quoted on fruiting body.

3. 03

   Convert to mg per ml

   Dried grams × 1,000 ÷ bottle size in ml. This single number lets you rank any two bottles honestly.

4. 04

   Then look at price per ml

   Retail price ÷ bottle size. Cheap per bottle and expensive per milligram is the most common trap in this category.

07. What a ratio cannot tell you

Density is necessary, not sufficient. A high ratio on poor raw material is still poor. What goes into the extractor decides the ceiling: whether it is first flush, whether it is grown or foraged with any traceability, whether it is certified organic, and whether the extraction is genuinely dual, hot water for the beta-glucans, alcohol for the triterpenes, rather than one and a label implying the other.

Ratio is the last number in that chain, not the first. It is simply the one you can check from the sofa, which is why we start there. Our testing and analysis covers the rest.

Shrooma tinctures are food supplements and are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.