An earlier version of this page gave you six reasons to drink mushroom coffee, and every one of them was a promise about your body. We could not substantiate a single one, so we took them all down.
Here are six replacements. Each is a fact you can check, and not one of them is about your health.
Reason OneIt Is Actually Coffee
A surprising number of things sold as mushroom coffee are not coffee. Chicory, barley and dandelion blends exist, and they are honest products, but they are not coffee.
Ours is premium Indian Arabica, freeze-dried to instant. Not a substitute, not decaffeinated, not cut with a cheaper bean. One level teaspoon into hot water or milk: 2.5g at 500mg strength, 3g at 1000mg.
Read the ingredient list. If coffee is not first, it is not coffee.
Reason TwoFruiting Body, Never Mycelium on Grain
A fungus has two parts. The mycelium is the thread network in the substrate. The fruiting body is the mushroom.
Growing mycelium is fast and cheap. Sterilise a bag of rice or oats, inoculate it, harvest in weeks. Growing a fruiting body takes months.
The trouble is that mycelium cannot be separated from the grain it grew on. Both go into the mill. A large fraction of that powder, frequently most of it, is starch.
Watch for myceliated grain, full spectrum, mycelial biomass, or rice on an ingredient list. And watch for the absence of a beta-glucan figure, which is the next reason.
Reason ThreeThe Extraction Is Matched to the Species
This is the reason almost nobody gives, because it costs money.
Hot water pulls out beta-glucans and the other water-soluble polysaccharides. Ethanol pulls out triterpenes, sterols and the alcohol-soluble compounds. Run every mushroom through the same process and you will lose half of some of them.
- Reishi's ganoderic acids are alcohol-soluble. Hot water alone does not pull them out. It gets a dual extraction.
- Turkey Tail's compounds are water-soluble. Adding ethanol costs money and removes nothing worth having. It gets hot water only.
So the five in our blend are not all extracted the same way, and we do not print a single ratio across all five, because a blend of five different methods cannot honestly carry one number.
If a brand tells you its five-mushroom blend is "8:1 dual extracted", ask them what they did with the Turkey Tail. The honest answer costs them the neat number.
Reason FourEvery Batch Is Measured, Including the One We Cannot
Every extract in the blend is lab-tested in India per batch, and every compound figure below is a disclosed minimum. Each batch meets or exceeds it. That is what the ≥ means, and it is why we can print it on a product you will buy months from now.
| In the blend | Marquee compound | What we disclose, per batch |
|---|---|---|
| Lion's Mane | Hericenones | Beta-D-glucans ≥ 26.20% |
| Cordyceps militaris | Cordycepin | Cordycepin ≥ 0.35%, polysaccharides ≥ 51.34% |
| Reishi | Triterpenes | Triterpenes ≥ 6.13%, polysaccharides ≥ 25.11% |
| Turkey Tail | Beta-glucans | Glucans ≥ 47.53%, polysaccharides ≥ 57.66% |
| Chaga | Betulin | Glucans ≥ 12.50%, polysaccharides ≥ 17.38% |
Five species. Five compound figures. Ask any other mushroom coffee for the same table.
All five are fungi, and every fungal cell wall contains beta-glucans. The compounds in the middle column are what distinguish one species from another. And "polysaccharide" means any long-chain sugar, so a powder made largely of ground rice can honestly report a high polysaccharide figure and never mention the rice. Beta-glucans is the number that describes the fungus.
Reason Five100mg of Suntheanine, and Why That Number
Of everything in the cup, exactly one component has been through repeated double-blind, placebo-controlled trials at close to the dose we use. It is not a mushroom.
L-theanine is an amino acid found in tea. It exists in two mirror-image forms, and cheap bulk theanine is often a mixture of both. Suntheanine is a patented ingredient made by Taiyo through enzymatic fermentation rather than chemical synthesis, and it is over 99 percent the pure L-isomer, the form that occurs in a tea leaf.
It is also, by a distance, the most expensive thing in our cup. Most mushroom coffees contain none at all.
Owen, Parnell, De Bruin & Rycroft, 2008
100mg L-theanine with 50mg caffeine, 27 participants, crossover design. Measured speed and accuracy on an attention-switching task, and susceptibility to distraction, against placebo.
Giesbrecht, Rycroft, Rowson & De Bruin, 2010
97mg with 40mg caffeine, 44 participants. Measured task-switching accuracy, self-reported alertness and self-reported tiredness.
The same paper reported a small increase in systolic blood pressure with the combination. It is in the abstract, and it has never appeared on this page before.
Haskell, Kennedy, Milne, Wesnes & Scholey, 2008
250mg with 150mg caffeine. Tested L-theanine alone, caffeine alone, and the two together. The doses were considerably higher than ours, and we say so rather than borrow the result.
Owen 2008 and Giesbrecht 2010 were both funded by Unilever R&D, which sells tea-based drinks. All three are peer-reviewed, double-blind and placebo-controlled, which is more than most of this industry can say for its citations. We disclose the funding because it is relevant, and because you would not otherwise know.
We use 100mg because Owen used 100mg and Giesbrecht used 97mg. That is the entire reasoning. It is a statement about a dose, not a promise about an outcome. A brand that puts 25mg in a serving and cites these papers is citing a study of something else.
Reason SixYou Can Start With Five Cups
Two strengths of the same blend. Same coffee, same 100mg of Suntheanine in each. Only the mushroom extract total changes.
| 500mg Essential | 1000mg Optimal | |
|---|---|---|
| Mushroom extract, per serving | 500mg | 1000mg |
| Each of the five species | 100mg each | 200mg each |
| Suntheanine | 100mg | 100mg |
| Serving size | 2.5g, one level teaspoon | 3g, one level teaspoon |
| Coffee | Premium Indian Arabica, freeze-dried to instant | |
| Suits | More than one cup a day, or a gentler start | A single, stronger cup |
The five extracts are distributed equally. At 500mg that is 100mg each of Lion's Mane, Cordyceps militaris, Reishi, Chaga and Turkey Tail. At 1000mg it is 200mg each.
Add them up. Five times one hundred is five hundred. Five times two hundred is one thousand. If a label prints a per-mushroom split that does not reach its own headline figure, or quietly omits a species from the list, you have learned something about the label.
Both come in five sizes, from a five-serving trial pack upward, and in two packagings: a resealable Dose Bag, or a biophotonic violet glass jar which ships with five extra servings and keeps light off the extract.
The trial pack exists because we cannot tell you which strength you want, and neither can anybody else. Five cups will.
What We Do Not Know
A two-and-a-half to three gram serving of instant coffee typically contains somewhere between sixty and eighty milligrams of caffeine. Typically.
We have not measured the caffeine in our own serving. Until we have, we are not going to call it low-caffeine, and neither should anybody who has not run the assay. When the number exists, it goes on the product page and on this one.
A number without a certificate behind it is not a specification. It is a decoration.
What We Will Not Say
The page you are reading replaced one that promised a great deal. It is worth naming what went, so you can watch for it elsewhere.
- Any claim about what this drink does to your body or your mind. The published human literature on these five species is small, short, and largely preclinical.
- Any comparison with ordinary coffee. Saying a drink is gentler than something else is a claim about that something else. Nobody has run the trial, and we are not going to imply the result of one.
- Any percentage without a certificate. Including for the blend as a whole, which has never been assayed as a blend.
- Any borrowed study. Mallard 2019 found that a rationally combined mushroom formulation behaved differently from the sum of its parts. It was cells in a dish, the blend was Reishi, Shiitake and Maitake, and two of the authors were employed by the sponsor of a competing formulation. It supports a principle. It says nothing about ours.
How to Make It
One level teaspoon, 2.5g at 500mg strength or 3g at 1000mg, into a small amount of hot water first. Stir or froth into a smooth paste, then top up with hot water, milk or a plant alternative.
For a cold drink, make the paste with hot water first regardless. Instant coffee and cold water are not natural friends, and skipping this step is why home cups go grainy.
One to three cups a day, and treat the third one the way you would treat a third coffee.
Questions
Does mushroom coffee taste like mushrooms?
No. Extracted mushroom powder is not a mushroom, and at the dose used it adds an earthy, slightly nutty depth rather than a flavour of its own. Reishi contributes a faint bitterness. If a mushroom coffee tastes strongly of mushroom, the extract is poor, or there is ground mushroom in there rather than extract.
Does it have caffeine?
Yes. It is instant Arabica coffee and it behaves like coffee. We have not yet published a measured figure for our own serving.
Is any of it psychedelic?
No. Psilocybin comes from an entirely unrelated genus of fungi. Lion's Mane, Cordyceps, Reishi, Chaga and Turkey Tail contain no psilocybin and nothing psychoactive. The only psychoactive substance in the cup is caffeine.
Does mushroom coffee break a fast?
Strictly, yes. A serving contains a small number of calories. Whether it breaks your fast depends on why you are fasting, which is a question for whoever set the protocol.
Who should not drink it?
It contains caffeine, so not children, and pregnant women should follow their doctor's caffeine guidance. Chaga is high in oxalates, so anyone with kidney disease or a history of kidney stones should avoid it. Anyone taking an anticoagulant should speak to a doctor about the Reishi. Anyone with a mould or fungal allergy should avoid all of it.
MycoSynergy Mushroom Coffee
Premium Indian Arabica with five mushroom fruiting-body extracts at 500mg or 1000mg per serving, and 100mg of Suntheanine, the dose Owen 2008 and Giesbrecht 2010 tested. No promises attached.
See MycoSynergy →
