Before The Sole Connection was a farm, it was a question I couldn't stop thinking about: could fungi actually break down plastic? I first ran into the research on fungal plastic degradation years ago, but it became a real, hands-on project during COVID, while I was working for a plastics manufacturer. I started experimenting with different oyster mushroom strains against different polymers on the side — informally at first, then with an actual protocol. That work became the seed for what's...

Here's something most people don't realize until they've looked into it: a mushroom's most valuable compounds don't all dissolve in the same liquid. Some only come out in alcohol. Some only come out in hot water. If you extract with just one, you're leaving a real, measurable share of the mushroom behind — no matter how good the mushroom itself was to begin with. That's the entire case for dual extraction, and it's why we run every batch through both an alcohol extraction and a water...

If you pick up ten mushroom tinctures off a shelf right now, chances are that none of the ten companies behind them ever grew a single mushroom. Most functional mushroom products in the U.S. are made the same basic way: a company buys bulk extract powder, usually imported, mixes it into a base liquid, bottles it, and puts their label on it. The mushroom itself might have been grown, harvested, and processed on another continent, by people the label-owner has never met, using methods they...