From Fresh-Picked to Bottled: Inside Our Extraction Process

Most tinctures on a store shelf started somewhere far away, as bulk powder or bulk extract, from mushrooms nobody at the company ever actually grew. Ours don't.

Every bottle of Sole Connection tincture starts as a mushroom we grew ourselves, on our farm, in grow chambers we built and manage every day — and it ends, roughly four months later, as the tincture in your hand.

Here's what happens in between:

It starts with what would otherwise be waste

Before a mushroom exists, it needs a substrate to grow in — and we've built ours almost entirely out of materials that would otherwise be thrown away. Sawdust waste from local mills and carpenters. Local straw. Spent coffee grounds from cafes nearby that would just be heading to a dumpster. We add lab-grade gypsum to balance the mix, then inoculate it with our mushroom spawn and let colonization take over.

It's a small thing, but it matters to us: before our mushrooms ever become medicine, they're already doing something useful — turning local waste streams into the raw material for a functional food.

Fruiting, harvest, and drying

Once a grow bag is fully colonized, it moves into our on-farm fruiting chambers, where we manage humidity, fresh air exchange, and light to trigger the mushrooms to actually fruit. From there it's the part that looks the most like farming: harvesting by hand, at the right point in each mushroom's growth, then drying and powdering the harvest so it's ready for extraction.

This is also the point where a lot of commercial mushroom products quietly cut corners — using mycelium grown on grain instead of the actual fruiting body, or skipping proper drying. We don't.

What goes into extraction is the mushroom itself and only the mushroom.

The alcohol extraction: 16 weeks, not 16 hours

This is the part that surprises people most. We weigh out a precise ratio of dried mushroom powder to organic grain alcohol (190 proof) and combine them in mason jars. Then we wait —sixteen weeks, shaking every jar every single day to keep the extraction moving.

Why alcohol, and why so long? Alcohol is what pulls certain compounds out of a mushroom — things like triterpenes and other alcohol-soluble constituents — that water alone can't fully draw out. Rushing this step (and a lot of commercial tinctures do rush it) means leaving a meaningful amount of the mushroom's value behind in the mash.

The water extraction: a six-hour simmer

Once the alcohol extraction is done, we strain the mushroom mass out of the alcohol — but we're not done with that mass yet. It goes into a fresh batch, this time with water in the correct ratio to the alcohol volume we started with. We bring it to a boil, then simmer it for six hours.

This step pulls out an entirely different set of compounds — most notably beta-glucans, the water-soluble polysaccharides that mushrooms like Lion's Mane, Chaga, and Reishi are best known for. Alcohol alone can't extract these efficiently; water alone can't extract the alcohol-soluble compounds. That's the whole reason for doing both. After the simmer, we strain the mushroom mass a second time, this time recovering the water extract.

Combining, evaporating, and finishing

The alcohol extract and the water extract are then combined into a single solution — now carrying both sets of compounds. From there, we gently evaporate off the alcohol until the finished solution tests below 1% alcohol content. As that alcohol evaporates, we replace the lost volume with vegetable glycerin in proportion, warming the mixture until it's evenly distributed.

That last step matters more than it sounds like it should. It's what makes the finished tincture stable, food-grade, and low enough in alcohol that it works for people who are avoiding alcohol for their own reasons — without diluting what the mushroom and the process actually produced.

From there: bottle, label, seal. What started as a mushroom we grew from local waste materials is now sitting on a shelf as a finished tincture — roughly four months after we started.

Why we do it this way

None of this is the fastest way to make a tincture. A single-solvent extraction, or a shortcut on the 16-week alcohol maceration, would get a bottle to market faster and cheaper. We do it this way because we started this farm to make something we'd actually stand behind — and because when you grow the mushroom yourself and control every step after, you get to know exactly what's in the bottle. No imported bulk extract, no guessing what happened before it arrived at your door.

That's the whole difference, really: we're not buying a mushroom product and putting our label on it. We're growing the mushroom, and then we're the ones deciding, every single day for sixteen weeks, what happens to it next; and we believe that matters.