How to Make a Super Strong Turkey Tail Tincture: A Comprehensive Guide

Medicinal mushroom tinctures are very popular these days, and with good reason—they’re an easy and efficient way to include mushrooms in our diet every day. While we prefer to eat mushrooms, many medicinal mushrooms are not really all that yummy. So… we turn them into tincture which we add to coffee and tea. After several years of making double extraction methods using medicinal mushrooms, our techniques have regularly evolved. In the last few months however, they have really changed pretty dramatically.

The biggest factor driving the changes in my tincture recipe are the medicinal mushrooms themselves. We want to get more mushrooms into our bodies, and therefore into our tinctures. This definitely means just eating more of the mushrooms, in our food. That works great for lionsmane,.

We can eat gourmet mushrooms like maitake, oyster, shiitake, and cordyceps fresh or dehydrate them and use them later in cooking. We either grow, gather, or buy these mushrooms. But since medicinal mushrooms like birch polypore, red-belted polypore, reishi, turkey tail, chaga, and artists conk just don’t taste good, this isn’t practical for them. We have definitely started using extract powders more frequently because they are an easy way to add these species to food and beverages and don’t taste too bad. But of course, powdered extracts are quite difficult to make, so we buy them. My hands-down favorite brand is Hamilton’s Extracts. These powders really allow us to easily push more medicinal mushrooms right into our bodies.

This desire for more mushrooms is partly a rising-tide sort of thing. Our desire to consume more grams of mushrooms more frequently throughout the day and week increases as we gain more knowledge. Daily mushroom consumption seems to be an entirely positive thing. Furthermore, I want to get some variety as different mushrooms bring different benefits. I try to consume several different species each day.

Triple Double Double Tincture

Ultimately, I didn’t like how “thick” the final water soak was and wanted more liquid in that soak. I would rather have very runny oatmeal with some liquid collecting in the pan’s bottom. This was like clumpy oatmeal. In addition, I was a little uncomfortable with the alcohol to water ratio, so I wanted to be a little more explicit about it. The reason for the imprecision was the alcohol that was moved in the marc from the alcohol soak into the water soak. Some algebra is required to calculate ratios at that point. Unknown about me, but I used to teach math in high school, so I kind of like algebra.

For my next iteration, I did the three alcohol soaks pretty much the same way as described above. But for the water step, I decided to dry out the marc, which was worked brilliantly! Several advantages:

• After drying, the marc became shelf stable, so I didn’t have to store it in the freezer.
• The alcohol was allowed to evaporate completely by drying the marc, which made it easier and more accurate for me to calculate my final alcohol percentage (20%).
• Actually, drying the marc reduced the alcohol content by roughly 0. 50%. This meant I needed 50% less water.
• Plus, one surprise. The marc only weighed 100g after I dried it. This suggests that the mushrooms had lost up to 50% of their weight because of the alcohol! I’m not sure what the science is behind this. I did not test it on every batch, so I’m not sure if this is a thing.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough water for me to soak the 150 mg of mushrooms in 600 ml.

I really needed more water, even though I knew that even after hard squeezing, at least 200 ml would remain in the final marc. So, I revised the water soak:

• I heated half of the marc in 900ml of water at 220F for two hours. Because I believe some medications are released at hotter soaks (and even high-pressure soaks) that the 160 degree soak missed, I wanted to perform a hotter soak. To get this temperature, use an insta-pot or magical butter machine. I strained out the liquid and discarded the spent marc. I had about 750 ml of liquid at this point.
• I took the second half of the marc and added the 750 milliliters of water from the first soak. I soaked and stirred for 4 hours at 160F. In my view, the lower temperature doesn’t damage the more delicate components that might degrade at higher temperatures, even though it may draw less therapeutic components (polysaccharides). That is all conjecture though. As a result, the temperature of the finished water-soaked product was halfway between high and medium. After straining and squeezing, I had 600ml of liquid.

This triple double double tincture worked out pretty well. 150mg of mushrooms yielded 800ml of liquid, thus a concentration of 3:16 or 19% mushrooms. A nice improvement over a simple double tincture.

Double Tinctures have Drawbacks

Although our article goes into great detail about making your own tincture with mushroom extracts, I question my own method because, well, I did the math and this is how it looks: 50g of mushrooms are used to make a double extraction tincture, which is approximately 1200ml when finished. There are also 300 ml of alcohol and 900 ml of water. I was able to increase that a bit, but not much. You just cannot put more mushrooms into the jar and cover them with alcohol. 50g of mushrooms for 1200ml of tincture is a 1:24 ratio of mushrooms to tincture, or approximately 4%. Keep in mind there are a lot of factors and this is just an estimate. (I worked the math immediately below if it helps. ).

One way to overcome these low mushroom percentages is to soak 1/3ish of your mushrooms in the alcohol and then do the second soak in water (emphasizing the polysaccharides a bit over the terpenes). This leaves way too much water! But, you can boil the water down until it is the right amount of water. Our friend Dr Dave (Carbondale Acupuncture Center) uses this technique which hails from his traditional Chinese medicine background . We have erred on the side of caution and tried not to boil our h20, but, who knows? It is a traditional technique and some modern science indicates the boiling is OK too.

The recent publication of Christopher Hobbs’ book Medicinal Mushrooms only serves to heighten this craving for more mushrooms per milliliter. Fantastic book! He really advocates for actually consuming the entire fruiting body, even of bitter non-gourmet mushrooms. He has several recipes, techniques and tips to help you do so. But, we still like tincture for easy daily consumption.

My thoughts came to a head when I enrolled in a class instructed by the foremost authorities on medicinal mushrooms, Tradd Cotter and Robert Rodgers. I really trust these two individuals and their opinions on this matter. They did some more math during the class, demonstrating that it just doesn’t make sense. In the event that I were to consume fifty grams of mushrooms, I would require one or two cups of the tincture, which may be considered excessive (E2%80%A6%20eek). The tincture contains 25% alcohol, which is 20%E2%80%93%20way too much alcohol. Fortunately, they provided a solution which really makes sense. Read on….

Before Continuing, here is a bit of a math breakdown and some of the challenges.

Some thoughts:

• I measure everything with a scale, from liquids to milliliters and solids to grams.
• Because I’m not very precise with measurements, I often round up or down.
• Not every mushroom needs to soak in the same amount of liquid; some
• The amount of liquid that a mushroom can hold after being squeezed varies, and the wet part of the mushroom is referred to as the marc.
• How finely you grind your mushrooms can have an impact on their carrying capacity, or the amount of liquid that stays in the marc.
• The aforementioned five bullets show that my estimations are “rough” and change with every batch.

Typically, double tincture numbers looks something like this:

• Using 500 milliliters of alcohol and 50 grams of mushroom body,
• 300ml of marc and 150g of infused alcohol are created after the marc is strained and squeezed, and they are then dried. If the 100 milliliters of alcohol that are still in the marc are not dried but are instead submerged in water, this needs to be taken into consideration.
• The 50g of marc is then soaked in 1000ml of H20.
• Nine hundred milliliters of infused water are obtained upon straining and squeezing the marc.
• When the 900 ml of infused h20 and the 300 ml of proof alcohol are combined, the outcome is a 20 212 00 ml of alcoholic tincture (20 2024%).
• The final ratio of mushrooms to tincture is 50:1200%, or approximately 24:40%E2%80%9324%.

Tradd and Robert’s solution to a more concentrated tincture was simple: do multiple soakings with the same liquid. Basically, after each soaking, reserve the liquid and re-soak it into another batch of mushrooms. In practice this was harder than it seemed.

The first time I tried it, here was what I did:

• 50g soaked in dried
• after pressing and straining the liquid out, I saved the marc (the solids). I put it into the freezer to preserve. First, even after squeezing the 50g of dried mushrooms well, their current weight was 150 mg. Second, I was unable to squeeze out the remaining 100ml of alcohol from my wet marc because the 250ml of alcohol had reduced to 125ml. Plus at least 25g just disappeared, go figure.
• soaked it for two weeks after adding 50 fresh grams of dried mushrooms to 125 milliliters of alcohol and topping it off with 3000 milliliters. Repeat the squeeze & freeze.
• Did a third soak, just like the first two.
• After three soaks, I would have about 200 milliliters of liquid at this point. Furthermore, my 450 mg of wet marc contained 300 mg of alcohol.
• took the marc and added about 1500 milliliters of water. This would give me the final tincture’s strength when combined with 500 milliliters of alcohol (200 milliliters of liquid and 300 milliliters of alcohol already present in the marc).
• Soaked that at 160F for 8 hours. This resulted in an incredibly thick and almost oatmeal-like mess! strained and combined with my alcohol to produce a tincture that was roughly 1600 milliliters.

This tincture took over six weeks to make, involving three alcohol soakings and one water soaking, and it appeared to be of very high quality. Red belted polypore (Fomitopsis mounceae), which was collected in Northern Wisconsin, was used to create the image on the right above.

It felt like a real win because I was able to add almost three times as much mushroom matter to this tincture. 150mg per 1500mg of final tincture is a 1:10 ratio or a 10% concentration of mushrooms.

Turkey Tail Extract 2018 – Super easy to make / very healthy mushroom -Trametes versicolor tincture

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