Bristol Fungarium | Organic Mushroom Extracts

🍄🧬 Crude Polysaccharide Test 🧬🍄 We often talk about the strength of our tinctures. For the past five years, we have poured ourselves into making the most potent mushroom extracts we can possibly produce - triple extracted, 1:4 tinctures made with a liberal amount of organic and native Somerset-grown fungi that we cultivate here at the farm 🍄 “But doesn’t everyone harp on about the potency of their medicinal mushroom extracts these days?” We hear you cry… YUP. We fully appreciate how convoluted this makes things as a consumer, avidly researching the brave new world of functional mushroom supplements only to find a dozen brands saying exactly the same thing. It’s a maze of information out there, so sometimes it can help to see things visually 🧐 As @martin_powell_insta pointed out during last year’s Medicinal Mushroom Conference, some of the best indicators for the strength of an extract are sensory. What does it look like? How viscous is the tincture? How does it taste? Is the Turkey tail mucilaginous? Is the Reishi bitter? 🤔 Using these relatively common sense practices are a really good way to get to grips with how much actual mushroom has made its way into the extraction process, and how comprehensive that extraction process has been to produce the final tincture ⚗️ A rough and ready guide for tincture quality is this crude polysaccharide test - which forces the water soluble compounds (mainly the long chain polysaccharides) out of solution and so enables you to actually get a visual on how much is contained in a given sample. It’s super simple, albeit a little rudimentary - and we’ve used it to observe various brand offerings over the past few years. We have then sent several off to the lab for third party testing using Megazymes Betaglucan assay (more on that in another post! Some of the results are quite staggering). Loosely speaking, there are 3 steps: 🧪 0.7ml of the sample mushroom tincture is taken and added to a test tube 🧪 The sample is topped up with x10 of the equivalent (so 7ml ) 97% ethanol 🧪 Finally, the test tube is lightly shaken to stir up the solution [continued in comments…] 🥼 #BristolFungarium #BristolBorn #ScienceLed