What's Up with the Mushroom Tea?

There’s a new type of tea showing up at your health food store, and it’s not exactly plucked from leafy fields or served with crumpets: it’s mushroom.

Sipping fungi for health reasons has been done for thousands of years in the East, and recently Western wellness insiders have been brewing the earthy little, grow-in-the-dark spores for things like stress-reduction, immunity, and a long list of health benefits.

In part, this trend is due to increased availability of mushrooms that lend themselves to beverages. Four Sigma Foods, a Finnish brand that specializes in mushroom tea, recently relocated its headquarters to Los Angeles and is in the process of making its products available all over California and New York (and in 21 other countries).

Indie brands are hopping on the mushroom tea train, too, like Moon Juice, Buddha Teas,Terrasoul Superfoods, and Cap Beauty, which stocks Four Sigma Foods in addition to Sun Potion reishi mushrooms.

Mushrooms like reishi are adaptogens, meaning they help your body manage stress. (Turmeric is another adaptogen.) They respond to what our systems need through the miracle of plant intelligence, supporting you from the inside out.

Why all the health hype?

You’d be surprised by how much existing research there is on mushrooms’ health-boosting properties, explains Four Sigma Foods president Tero Isokauppila, who hired a biochemist to collect scientific information on their benefits.

One surprising element of proof is the pretty abundant use of mushrooms in pharmaceuticals. According to the University of Sydney Mycology Department, at the beginning of the 21st century, fungi were involved in the industrial processing of more than 10 of the 20 most profitable products used in human medicine, including drugs for high cholesterol, antibiotics, and immunosuppressants. Cordyceps, for example, were used to create the drug Gileyna, used to fight autoimmune disease multiple sclerosis.

Cordyceps are one of the three main types of mushrooms the teas tend to focus on, along with reishi and chaga. Reishi is the most studied and the queen of mushrooms; it can help regulate hormones, lower stress, and break down [stress-related] cortisol. Chaga has the highest source of antioxidants…while cordyceps are really good for oxygen intake, so a lot of athletes drink that. Maybe your new pre-workout hydration ritual? Which brings us to a very important question…

Is mushroom tea even drinkable?

Since mushrooms don’t come in pretty leaf form, their active components are made into powder, which comes in tea bags or in a pouch like a sugar packet, which you can pour into hot water (or smoothies or coffee) and stir to dissolve.

In your cup, it resembles coffee—that is, it’s a brown, nearly opaque liquid. As for the taste, you can certainly tell that it’s healthy. A few of us tried Four Sigma Food’s Instant Reishi, a powder blended with star anise, mint leaf, licorice root, and stevia, in hot water. It smells like a diluted cup of miso soup and is surprisingly sweet (from the stevia) but isn’t all that different from a weak black tea.

And if you want to sip it during a work meeting (to balance out the stress said meeting might create), there’s no real funky fungi scent that would give you away. 

~Thanks to Jamie McKillop