How To Make Mushroom Tea The Right Way: A Better Lemon Tek

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Have you ever excitingly eaten 2-3 grams of mushrooms and find yourself fighting stomach pains and discomfort during your come up? Undoubtedly this is one of the least enjoyable aspects of eating raw dried cubensis, and sets the stage for an uncomfortable experience for some.

The stomach issues are partly due to the hard to digest Chitin in mushroom cell walls. Chitin is made of long chains of simple sugars, called a polysaccharide. Chitin is not readily digested by human stomachs.

You can avoid having to ingest most of the chitin by extracting the Psilocybin with a solvent. In simpler words, making tea! Additionally, dissolving the Psilocybin into water increase its rate of absorption, making the onset of effects faster.

Making mushroom tea may seem straight forward, but we can significantly improve the extraction by making a few adjustments.

Tip #1: Break Up Your Mushrooms

I will be using 3 grams of Melmak Cubensis for every dose of mushroom tea I make, but the amount and strain are up to you. Begin by breaking up your dried mushrooms into pieces approximately 2-4mm wide. We want to increase the surface area of the mushroom exposed to water, but not so much that filtering it later is difficult. I personally use a cheap dollar store herb grinder, which gives me great results.

Place your ground mushrooms into the bottom of your mug. You are now ready to add start your extraction!

The Extraction

Here is where the process diverts from your typical cup of tea. Our goal is to pull as much medicinal ingredients out of the mushroom as possible. Many believe this is as simple as adding hot water and leaving it for as long as possible. While a longer steeped tea is stronger, this is not where I’ve found the greatest improvement.
Tip #2: Use Lemon!

You may have heard of the Lemon Tek method, in which the mushrooms are soaked completely in lemon juice.

Many Lemon Teks use excessive amounts of lemon, soaking the entire amount of mushroom with lemon juice. This is unnecessary! We only need to convert in the ballpark of 10-20mg of psilocybin. One lemon slice has enough acid in it to easily convert this amount.

First, squeeze your fresh lemon into the mug.

Next, add just enough water to wet all of the dried mushroom. The water allows the acid to reach all parts of the mushrooms. Let this sit for 10-20 minutes. You will begin to see the mushrooms turn blue.

Tip #3: Hot or Not?

You may assume that if we are making tea, we need hot water. This is certainly the conventional way, but its importance is overstated. If you wish to flavour your tea with a bag of another tea, hot water is your best option. However, if you have added lemon, cold water works fine!

The only reason we heat solvents in extractions is to increase the solubility of compounds in a solvent. However Psilocybin is quite soluble in room temperature water! It is estimated around 2g/L, or 2000mg/L. To give perspective, we are ingesting around 10-20mg of Psilocybin/Psilocin. So, a cup of room temperature water has plenty enough space to dissolve our medicine into!

To convince any skeptical readers, who are cringing at all of the conventional methods I’ve just thrown out, let us experiment!

I will prepare one glass with just mushrooms and hot water. To the second, I will follow the methods I described (lemon, grind), and use room temperature water.

Here we go! Time to add the water. First, I’ll add the hot water and give it a head start. Now, I’ll add water to the glass with lemon.

Time to let these steep! I left both for 30 minutes and returned. First, let’s look at the one steeped with hot water. As you can see, we have definitely extracted something judging by the colour. Keep in mind, as we have not acidified the solution, so the classic blue colour has not formed! Most of the active compound is still in the form of Psilocybin,which does not have the blue colour of Psilocin.

That’s our hot cup of tea, now lets look at the cold refreshing lemon beverage we have prepared. We can clearly see a colour difference!

Our glass of blue mushroom juice might look like blue raspberry, but it still taste like lemon and fungus. Not bad in my opinion, but not everyone’s taste. Masking the taste is not difficult, so I’ll give a few ingredients I’ve tried and enjoyed.

Ginger
Great for settling your stomach and getting relaxed before an experience.

Honey
The sweetness hides the mushroom taste and gives you a small energy boost.

Stinging Nettle
My favourite addition, its rich, bright, green flavour, along with its high nutritional value, wake your taste buds and your body. This is one of the most synergetic combinations I have ever tried.

Your Favourite Bag Of Tea
Simply plopping a tea bag into your mug of mushroom tea will give you enough masking flavour. Just be sure to not add the tea bag too early.