Lion’s Mane Capsules,
Powder or Drops: Which Fits Your Day?

Lion’s mane liquid drops: 2ml of a 35:1 extract, straight or in a drink

Prefer a liquid? Our Lion’s Mane Extract drops give 1,750mg from a 35:1 extract in 2ml, which is 50mg of extract with 25mg of polysaccharides, in a base of spring water and glycerin, the humectant that keeps a liquid from drying out, with potassium sorbate, a preservative that prolongs its shelf life 7 10. The 60ml bottle holds 30 servings for £8.99, about 30p each, taken straight from the dropper or in water or any drink you prefer 7.

Per serving it holds the least extract of the three, 50mg against 1g in a quarter teaspoon of the powder, which is the trade for measuring by the dropper rather than the spoon 6 7. If you’d rather measure by the dropper than count capsules, liquid lion’s mane is the one for you: the bottle prints liquid above the name, and its ingredient line names the lion’s mane mushroom 35:1 extract 7. The 52,500mg in the product’s name is the whole bottle: 1,750mg in each of its 30 servings 7.

Lion’s mane tablets, capsules or powder: what each one physically is

Seen lion’s mane tablets and wondered how they compare with a capsule? A tablet is powder pressed into a small solid, where a capsule holds a measured amount of extract inside a shell, a powder is the extract on its own, measured by the spoon, and drops are an extract in a liquid, measured by the millilitre.

We sell no lion’s mane mushroom tablets, so the comparison in this guide is between our capsules, powder and drops, and whatever the format, the figure to hold is the extract in one serving and what you pay for it. If a measured serving with no taste is what you want from a tablet, the capsules are the nearest format we sell 5.

Lion’s mane and reishi together: the three mushroom blends

If you already take one of our mushroom blends, three capsules of the Organic Seven Mushroom Complex give 225mg of organic lion’s mane beside reishi, cordyceps, white fungus, maitake, shiitake and chaga 11. A quarter teaspoon of the Organic 7 Mushroom Blend Powder gives 200mg 12. Two capsules of the 8 Mushroom Complex give 2,250mg of lion’s mane from a 15:1 extract, which is 150mg of extract 13.

The capsules and the powder give you far more lion’s mane in every serving, 1,400mg and 1g of extract, while a blend spreads its serving across seven or eight mushrooms 5 6. For another mushroom with a ratio and polysaccharides on its label, see our reishi guide.

So here’s the answer to the question the front raises: two capsules hold 1,400mg of lion’s mane extract, 700mg in each, and the panel says so in its own way, organic lion’s mane from 20:1 extract, 28,000mg 5. Divide 28,000 by 20 and you have the 1,400 5. That is what an extract ratio records, and every lion’s mane mushroom extract on our labels prints one: the weight of dried starting material to the weight of extract made from it, as the European guideline on herbal extracts defines it, so 20 parts of dried mushroom became one part of extract 14.

The same reading works for the other two labels: the powder prints 20,000mg for a quarter teaspoon, which is 1g of extract, and the drops print 1,750mg for 2ml, which is 50mg of a 35:1 extract, 35 parts to one 6 7. Set the three side by side and the extract in a serving is the figure to compare, together with the polysaccharides it provides 5 6 7.

50% polysaccharides: the figure that lets you compare

Polysaccharides are complex carbohydrates, such as starch and cellulose, formed of large molecules 15: long chains of sugar units. On our labels 50% means that half of the extract by weight is polysaccharides, so two capsules carry 700mg of them, a quarter teaspoon of the powder 500mg and 2ml of the drops 25mg 5 6 7.

Beta-glucans, which some other labels print, are one family of these polysaccharides, a structural part of the fungal cell wall 16. Our lion’s mane panels print the polysaccharide figure and no beta-glucan line, so polysaccharides are the number to compare between our three panels, and with any other label that prints one 5.

Why the panel prints no NRV, and what the organic leaf’s code tells you

Each panel carries two asterisks in the %NRV column. A Nutrient Reference Value is the daily amount a UK label measures a vitamin or mineral against, vitamin C at 80mg or vitamin D at 5µg, and none exists for a mushroom extract, so the panel gives milligrams and leaves it there 17 5. Some call them lion’s mane vitamins, but the pouch holds a mushroom extract, not a vitamin, which is why the panel prints two asterisks in place of a percentage 5 17.

Is it organic? Yes, for the capsules and the powder: each prints the organic leaf 5 6. The code beneath it names the control body that certified the company that labelled the product, and Non-EU Agriculture beneath the leaf says the agricultural ingredients were farmed outside the EU 18 19.

Ingredients are listed in order of weight, main ingredient first 20. On the capsules that is the extract, then the hypromellose shell, a material made from plant cellulose, then organic brown rice flour; on the powder the list is one line, the extract 5 6 21.

Lion’s mane, Hericium erinaceus, is a mushroom: a tooth fungus of the family Hericiaceae, its teeth the hanging spines on whose surfaces its spores form 8. It grows as a roundish fruitbody, 15 to 20cm across and sometimes 30cm, with every spine emerging from one point and cascading down like a mop head 8. The spines are 1 to 5cm long, soft and pointed, white at first and yellow-brown with age 8 1 22.

Kew calls it a wood-recycling fungus, often fruiting high on living trunks and as likely to be noticed by hikers and dog-walkers as by field mycologists 1.

It feeds in the dead heartwood of a living beech or oak, and for years it may be imprisoned there by the cylinder of living wood around it, escaping to fruit only where that cylinder is breached: a fissure, a fracture, a hollow, an old branch stub 1. Once it has found its way out, the same tree can fruit on and off from August to December for twenty years or more 22.

Lion’s mane fungus: the hedgehog in the name, and the jellyfish that shares it

The name is young in English: Merriam-Webster dates the first known use of lion’s mane for the mushroom to 1996 and explains it by the hairlike look of the mature fruitbody 23. The British name is bearded tooth, and the Latin is older than lion’s mane: Persoon placed the fungus in Hericium in 1797 8; Hericium means pertaining to a hedgehog, and erinaceus is the Latin noun for the animal, so the scientific name says hedgehog twice 8 24.

Wild Food UK adds pom pom mushroom and the Welsh pigau barfog 25; in China it is hou tou gu, and in Hailin in the north-east the Hailin hou tou gu carries a registered geographical indication, grown in semi-underground houses 26; in Japan it is yamabushitake 27.

The name has another owner, the lion’s mane jellyfish, Cyanea capillata, seen off all UK coasts in summer, whose largest recorded specimen trailed tentacles of 36.6 metres 28 29; this guide is about the mushroom.

Lion’s mane mushroom in the UK: the wild hedgehog fungus of beech and oak

In Britain it grows nearly always on beech and oak, on standing trees, stumps and fallen logs, and over 80% of the records are on beech 8 30. It is a very rare sight, found mainly in southern England and eastern Wales 8. Its stronghold is the New Forest in Hampshire, where Kew counts 40 to 45 trees that have carried fruitbodies at some time between 1960 and 2007 1.

By Kew’s count that is around 45% of the estimated 105 such trees in the whole of Britain 1. Its British rarity is a European matter too: around half (220) of its European localities recorded after 1980 were thought in 2003 to be in Britain or France, and it was red-listed in 13 of the 23 European countries where it had been recorded 1.

That rarity is written into law. Schedule 8 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 lists it, under the older spelling Hericium erinaceum, as the hedgehog fungus, beside the royal bolete, the oak polypore and the sandy stilt puffball, the only other fungi on the schedule, and section 13 makes it an offence in England and Wales to pick, uproot or destroy it on purpose 2 3 30. Kew notes that no fungus in the UK has a higher legal standing, so if you meet one on a beech, leave it where it is 1.

The records tell a story of their own. In Windsor Forest an ancient hollow beech fruited on and off from the 1960s until 1998; when it collapsed, a 4m section was re-erected in 2001 and strapped to a living beech, and no fruitbody has been seen on it since 1. A research report for English Nature in 2002 gave Hainault Forest’s last record as 1863 and Epping Forest’s as 1987 30, and in December 2022 a London National Park City ranger reported one in Epping Forest again 31.

Fresh lion’s mane as food: how UK growers raise it and how it is cooked

For all its rarity in the wild, the fungus is easily cultivated: Kew lists woodchips, sawdust and cellulose-rich crop residues such as cotton, sugar cane, rice and corn 1. In cultivation it can fruit in as little as two to three weeks, which Kew calls remarkable for a fungus so rarely seen fruiting in the wild 1. Hobby growers buy birch plugs carrying the white mycelium, tap them into holes in a cut log and seal them with wax; in due course cascades of white icicles emerge 8.

Artificial cultivation was first reported in China in 1959, where the mushroom has been a delicacy since ancient times, and China now grows about 85% of all the lion’s mane cultivated worldwide, on sawdust, cottonseed hulls or crop residues with bran 32 26. Growers steam the substrate, add the spawn and, once the white mycelium has run through it, move it to a cooler, lit cropping room to bring on the fruitbodies, as a commercial-scale trial in Thailand recorded 26 27.

Fresh lion’s mane is now a British crop too: in March 2025 a Kent organic farm put 200g punnets into Sainsbury’s at £5, the first time the mushroom had reached a UK supermarket 33, and a London grower raises it on wood-based substrates and sells it fresh in 150g and 500g packs 34. So the punnet, like the pouch, is a grown mushroom, never a gathered one 4.

Cooked, the taste is said to be rather like lobster cooked in butter, and the London grower advises frying it in a pan so its water cooks off, leaving it dense and succulent 8 34. Chefs Jack Croft and Will Murray peel it into strands to finish a mushroom parfait 35. In the kitchen, lion’s mane food means the fresh fruitbody, pan-fried, or made into steaks or crab cakes, three recipes that the grower Some Funguys, which raises it in a former nuclear bunker, lists on its recipe page 36.

The same mushroom, dried and extracted twenty to one, is what our pouches hold: the 28,000mg on the capsule front is the dried mushroom that went into two capsules 5 14.

What does lion’s mane powder taste like? Earthy, says the label; mild when fresh

Drying and extraction change it. The label’s word for the powder is naturally earthy, which is why it pairs it with something sweet or nutty, and Kew’s word for the fresh mushroom is mild, with a texture First Nature likens to fish or tender meat 6 1 8. The capsules are the choice for anyone who would rather not taste it at all 5.

Store the pouches and the bottle in a cool, dry place out of direct sunlight, keep them out of reach of young children, and don’t use the drops if the seal is missing or damaged 5 6 7. Our capsules, powder and drops sit in our lion’s mane range among our herbs, the drops among our herbal tinctures and the powder among our herbal powders; the capsules and the powder belong to our organic range, and all of them to our vegan and daily wellbeing ranges.