How Myco Powered Tinctures Are Made: A Complete Look at Our Dual Extraction Process
- Harold Evans
- Feb 12, 2025
- 4 min read
Updated: Mar 9
The functional mushroom supplement market has a transparency problem. Most products tell you what's in the bottle but very little about how it got there — what equipment was used, where the mushrooms came from, or whether the extraction process actually captures the compounds on the label. This post is our answer to that. Here's exactly how Myco Powered tinctures are made, from the source material to the finished product.
Where the Mushrooms Come From
Most of the species in Myco Powered tinctures are grown in house. Lion's mane, reishi, cordyceps, and oyster mushrooms are cultivated in our own lab under controlled conditions, which means we have direct oversight of everything that goes into the growing environment — substrate composition, contamination controls, and harvest timing. Growing your own extraction material isn't the easiest path, but it's the most accountable one.
Chaga and turkey tail are the exceptions. Neither is practical to cultivate at the scale or quality required for tincture production, so we source both from mycologists in the northeast who harvest wild material sustainably. Chaga in particular is a slow-growing organism with a fragile relationship to its host tree. Responsible harvesting means leaving enough behind to ensure the colony recovers. The people we work with understand that, and it's a non-negotiable part of the sourcing relationship.
What goes into the extractor is the foundation of everything that comes out of it. No process, however precise, can compensate for poor source material.
The Alcohol Extraction: Soxhlet Apparatus
The first stage of extraction targets fat-soluble compounds — triterpenes, phenolic compounds, sterols, and flavonoids. These are the compounds that require alcohol to become bioavailable and that a hot water extraction will never reach regardless of time or temperature.
To extract them we use a Soxhlet apparatus, a piece of laboratory equipment designed specifically for exhaustive solvent extraction. The basic principle is elegant: alcohol is heated until it vaporizes, rises into a chamber containing the mushroom material, condenses, saturates the material, and then siphons back down into the reservoir to be reheated and cycled through again. This continuous loop repeats until the solvent is fully enriched with extracted compounds.
What makes the Soxhlet process superior to a simple soak is that the mushroom material is always in contact with fresh solvent. In a jar extraction the solvent gradually becomes saturated and extraction efficiency drops off over time. The Soxhlet keeps cycling clean solvent through the material until there is nothing meaningful left to extract. The result is a significantly more concentrated alcohol extract than any passive method can produce.
The alcohol we use is organic cane alcohol, the highest quality food grade ethanol available. Solvent quality matters, whatever is in the alcohol ends up in the finished tincture.
The Water Extraction: Controlled Decoction
Once the alcohol extraction is complete, the same mushroom material moves directly into the water extraction phase. Using the same material for both extractions is deliberate. It ensures that every part of the source mushroom contributes to the finished tincture, and the Soxhlet process leaves the water-soluble compounds completely intact and ready to be extracted.
The target compounds at this stage are beta-glucans and polysaccharides, the water-soluble bioactives most associated with immune modulation and the ones with the strongest clinical research behind them. These compounds are unaffected by the alcohol extraction but require sustained heat to be released from the chitin matrix of the cell wall.
The water extraction uses reverse osmosis water and a controlled heating process maintained at a precise temperature for several hours. Using RO water eliminates the mineral content and potential contaminants present in tap or standard filtered water, ensuring that nothing interferes with the extraction or ends up in the finished product. Time and temperature are the critical variables at this stage — too low and extraction is incomplete, too high and the delicate polysaccharide structures begin to degrade. The specific parameters we use are part of the process we've developed over time and are outside the scope of this post, but the principle is the same as traditional decoction methods used in eastern medicine for centuries, executed with more precision and consistency than a stovetop allows.
Combining the Extracts
Once both extractions are complete, the alcohol and water extracts are combined and carefully balanced to achieve a final concentration of 250mg per ml. This is where solvent ratio becomes critical — the final ABV needs to be high enough for shelf stability while maintaining the right balance between the two extract fractions. Myco Powered tinctures are finished at 30% ABV, slightly above the 25% minimum required for room temperature shelf stability, which extends usable life without compromising the integrity of the water-soluble compounds in the formula.
The finished tincture is a true full spectrum extract, meaning the complete range of both fat-soluble and water-soluble compounds from the source material is present in every bottle. Nothing is added, nothing is diluted with fillers, and the concentration is standardized so that every batch delivers the same dose of active compounds.
Many commercial tinctures don't disclose their concentration at all. A milligram per milliliter figure is a meaningful number that allows you to evaluate what you're actually getting per serving. Ours is on the label because we think it should be.
Final Thoughts
The functional mushroom supplement space has grown faster than the standards that should govern it. That's not unique to this industry, but it does mean that consumers have to ask harder questions and demand more specific answers than they would in a more regulated market. Where did the mushrooms come from? What equipment was used? What is the actual concentration in the bottle?
Those aren't unreasonable questions and they deserve straight answers. That's what this post is. If you have more questions about our process or sourcing, we're happy to answer them.
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