Why a Tincture?

I used to make mushroom powders. Now we make one tincture.

I get asked this a lot, so here’s my honest answer.

The powders sold well. People liked them. But the more we tested, it become clear that powders is a hard format to keep consistent. Batch to batch, compound levels moved more than I was comfortable with and you can’t stabilise them effectively.

So I went looking for a better format and found one that had been sitting there for centuries.

A tincture is just a concentrated extract held in water and alcohol. It’s how apothecaries prepared plant medicine for hundreds of years, long before capsules or powders existed, because it was the only method that reliably pulled the active compounds out and kept them stable.

And it turns out traditional Chinese preparation of Reishi worked the same way. Not just simmered in water also steeped in alcohol. Nobody then knew the word triterpene. They just knew that water alone didn’t get everything out and alcohol did.

That’s exactly what we do now, with lab testing instead of guesswork. 

Baseline is what came out of that. Three mushrooms - Lion’s Mane for clarity, Reishi for calm, Cordyceps sinensis for energy. Fruiting body only. Nothing added. No mycelium grown on grain, no maltodextrin, no filler.

Just mushroom extract, purified water and food-grade alcohol.

What about the Flow Brew process?

So what was wrong with the powders?

Two things, and neither is the mushroom's fault.

The first is dose honesty. A powder has to taste drinkable and mix into coffee, which limits how concentrated you can make it. A lot of what's sold as mushroom powder is mostly grain substrate with some mycelium on it, the fruiting body, where the compounds actually are. Ours weren't like that. But I was competing on a shelf where the customer had no way to tell the difference.

The second is what happens after you drink it. A powder goes through your whole digestive system before anything reaches you. Some compounds survive that well. Others don't.

I kept looking for a version of the powder range I could argue for properly. I didn't find one. So I stopped making them and put everything into one format I could.

What about extraction?

Mushrooms keep their active compounds behind chitin, a tough cell wall your body can't break down. Eat a raw mushroom and most of what you're after stays locked inside. This is the single most important thing to understand about mushroom supplements, and it's why "contains Reishi" on a label means very little on its own.

There are two useful compound groups and they don't dissolve in the same thing.

Most brands do one or the other, because doing both costs more and takes longer. A water-only extract has no meaningful triterpene content. An alcohol-only extract has almost no beta-glucans. 

We do both, then combine them. That's what dual extraction means and it's genuinely the reason the tincture works when a lot of things haven't.

So - why a tincture?

Because it's the only format where I can do all of this at once: dual extract properly, keep both compound groups intact, dose it consistently and put nothing else in the bottle.

Everything else was a compromise somewhere. This isn't.

One product. Three mushrooms. Tested every batch and I'll show you the paperwork.

Questions I haven't answered here? Always feel free to email me directly at wow@drinkflowbrew.com.