If you’re a distiller trying to tap into new flavor profiles—or connect to the storytelling of foraging or growing your own ingredients, or engage with wellness-conscious, functional-beverage-loving customers—it might be time to consider how to incorporate mushrooms into your lineup.
The number of distillers working with fungi is still relatively small, but if you look hard enough, you’ll find mushrooms in product categories from vodka to gin to whiskey. It’s a blossoming trend: According to Grand View Research, the mushroom-beverage market—which includes coffees, teas, and ready-to-drink cocktails (alcoholic or not)—was estimated to be worth $3.7 million in 2023, with a projected growth rate of 6.7 percent by 2030.
To drill down into the how and why of distilling with mushrooms, here are some insights from the producers of four different mushroom-centric products.
Mushroom-Motivated
Perhaps no two people were better suited to build an entire distillery around mushrooms than Joe and Wendy Rizzo, founders of Mushroom Spirits Distillery in Ithaca, New York.
Twenty years ago they started a mushroom farm, Blue Oyster Cultivation, which became a top local purveyor of gourmet varieties. Before long, however, Joe—a science teacher, until he and Wendy left Brooklyn to start the farm—was thinking about what else they could do with the mushrooms.
“People were doing mushroom teas and coffees, and we wanted to do something like that but different, highlighting mushrooms’ interesting flavors,” he says. “My last year of teaching, I was doing biofuels with my students and designing stills, which whet my appetite for distilling. … When I heard about the farm distillery license in New York State, we jumped at it. … It occurred to me that if somebody was going to make mushroom spirits, it should be us.”
The Rizzos launched Mushroom Spirits Distillery in 2019. Today, they make five different mushroom vodkas, a mushroom moonshine, and a mushroom whiskey.
Also in upstate New York, in the western Catskills, Isolation Proof makes a mushroom gin so popular that founder and distiller Jake Sherry made the limited release a perennial one. Experimenting with mushrooms fit right into Isolation Proof’s commitment to expanding on the possibilities of gin.
“We made the conscious decision to focus on gin as a distillery,” Sherry says. “I’m excited about the category because of the tremendous room for creativity—as long as you have juniper, you can do anything.”
Sherry began making classic gins and quickly started exploring the seasonal ingredients of the surrounding Catskills, from rhubarb to ramps. The mushroom gin started as a collaboration with Andrea Gentl, a Catskills-based photographer who shoots for spirit brands worldwide, and who also was writing a cookbook focused on mushrooms. Gentl proposed the idea of a mushroom gin to coincide with the cookbook’s release. Sherry says the concept exemplified Isolation Proof’s M.O. of making gin with unusual ingredients that push people’s palates.
Photo: Courtesy Veda Mushroom Liqueur
Also based in New York, Jeremy Block and Adam Starowicz were looking for intriguing flavors when they decided they wanted the character of mushrooms to be more central than it previously had been in alcoholic beverages. They founded Veda Mushroom Liqueur in 2024, aiming for an amaro-like product with the distinctive, recognizable aroma of mushrooms.
Block, a wine-and-spirits industry veteran, recruited chef Starowicz, and they landed on a partnership with Denning’s Point Distillery in Beacon, New York. Denning’s Point produces the neutral grain spirit that Block and Starowicz infuse with mushrooms. The result balances that amaro familiarity while spotlighting mushrooms enough to be an intriguing discovery for imbibers and a dynamic tool for bartenders.
While Mushrooms Spirits Distillery, Isolation Proof, and Veda are each driven by the flavors of different mushroom varieties, the national brand Little Saints cites their functional properties in its nonalcoholic canned cocktails and bottled spirits. Founder Megan Klein says they’ve also proven to boost mouthfeel, adding fullness and roundness where booze-free spirits often fall short.
Klein previously founded a plant-based food company, so she already had an idea of what mushrooms could do for her NA products, which she’d developed to deliver a more flavorful, celebratory drinking experience without alcohol or sugar.
Photo: Courtesy Little Saints
“I understood botanicals, had taken essential oils, and I really understood the way plants can be used for healing,” she says. “I’d been putting reishi and lion’s mane mushrooms in my coffee every day for years.”
Those two mushroom varieties became core elements of the Little Saints portfolio: Reishi—touted for its calming properties—goes into the Negroni Spritz, Spicy Margarita, Paloma, and Ginger Mule RTDs, while lion’s mane—said to boost creativity and induce subtle euphoria—goes into the St. Ember and St. Juniper NA spirits.
Selecting and Sourcing
Distillers who want to emphasize the flavor of mushrooms have options: There are more than 2,000 edible mushrooms, 650 of which are cultivated—a wide range that only narrows when distillers consider what’s local, what tastes good, and what they can work with.
At Isolation Proof, Sherry says he experimented with varieties such as lion’s mane, but he landed on maitake and shiitake—both sourced from nearby Tivoli Mushrooms—for a “huge burst of savory flavor that’s quintessential mushroom,” he says. He uses chamomile and green coriander to complement the umami character of the mushrooms for an earthy, spiced bouquet.
Block and Starowicz at Veda also favor shiitake’s flavor. “I thought it was going to be something weird like candy cap mushrooms,” Block says. “We tried reishi, porcini, oyster, everything. … I ran a farm [that] was growing mushrooms, and the most delicious mushrooms that could grow on oak forest lawns were shiitake. Everything else was either indistinct or price-prohibitive. Shiitake struck the perfect balance—not cheap but not crazy expensive, with good flavor [that doesn’t] drown everything else out.” Starowicz says they also have a long-term goal of growing their own mushrooms; for now, they source from a high-quality local company, which itself sources from small organic farms.
At Mushroom Spirits Distillery, experimenting across homegrown varieties is naturally part of the plan. The Rizzos grow everything except the chanterelles they use in their newest vodka. While they’ve since added their whiskey and moonshine, Joe Rizzo says they landed on vodka for most of their repertoire because of its neutral character, a blank canvas for showcasing different mushrooms. They’ve done just that with separate pleurotus, hen of the woods, enoki, and shiitake vodkas, plus the chanterelle.
“When we first started, my biggest fear was that [the spirits] wouldn’t taste good, but also that they’d have the same, generic, earthy flavor,” Joe says. “But [mushrooms] all have their own personalities. Shiitake tastes the most like a traditional, sauteed mushroom. Hen of the woods is bigger, richer, earthier, or heavier. Enoki is brighter. … I was pleasantly surprised.”
Prepping and Using Mushrooms
When working with something like botanicals, distillers often learn quickly that a little goes a long way. However, when you’re trying to ensure that the flavors of these fungi are rich and recognizable, Sherry says, a comparatively large amount is required. For 90- to 100-gallon gin batches, he uses 20 to 30 pounds of mushrooms. At Veda, Starowicz says every bottle has one third of a pound of mushrooms.
While using dried mushrooms seems to be the more common approach, Veda uses fresh shiitakes. “The flavors were always a bit too bitter and medicinal when we tried dried,” Starowicz says. However, Sherry and the Rizzos have found dried mushrooms the most effective for gin and vodka, respectively. Sherry says the farm he sources from dehydrates the mushrooms, which works because of how much water weight they’d have otherwise. Dehydrating them also concentrates their flavor.
“The less moisture … you have to deal with, the better,” Joe Rizzo says. “We’ve found it’s the best way to get the most consistent product.”
One outlier, considering the goal of functional and not flavor contributions, is Little Saints: Klein’s supplier extracts beta-glucans from the organic reishi and lion’s mane mushrooms. Beta-glucans, Klein says, provide some body that enriches the NA spirit’s mouthfeel.
When it comes to incorporating the mushrooms, Sherry adds them post-distillation, after distilling his base gin with the rest of his botanicals. “I found I got more of the flavor I was looking for this way,” he says. “And I get this really beautiful golden color, which would be lost if I was distilling that.” When the gin is close to bottling proof, Sherry adds the mushrooms in brew bags for a 72-hour steep, then he runs the gin through a particulate filter pre-packaging.
Mushroom Spirits’ vodkas and Veda’s liqueur also come to fruition via infusions. Joe Rizzo infuses for less than a week, regularly testing to determine when each batch has hit the target flavor profile. Block and Starowicz marinate their shiitakes in local maple syrup and honey, ultimately adding botanicals such as gentian, marshmallow root, mastic gum, coriander, rosemary, thyme, black pepper, and chile pepper. Finally, they combine that with the neutral grain spirit from Denning’s Point, strain, and bottle.
Photo: Courtesy Isolation Proof
Marketing Mushrooms
The final step—or, really, the first step, in terms of actual project-planning—is to make sure your mushroom spirit passes muster with the TTB.
The agency initially rejected Joe Rizzo’s forms for his mushroom vodka. “I had to petition the FDA to look into the safety of some varieties,” he says. “There are some popular mushrooms people consider medicinal mushrooms, and those got questioned by the TTB—they’re not dangerous to use, but they were afraid people were looking for that medicinal basis in the vodka.” Mushroom Spirits ultimately produced spirits with approved mushroom varieties, labeled “flavored vodka.”
“The TTB goes off of the FDA on what ingredients you can legally use with distilled spirits,” Sherry says. “I wrote to the FDA: ‘Hey, I’m planning to use maitake and shiitake mushrooms, any problems there?’ They said it was fine and to include their letter when submitting to the TTB.”
Marketing mushroom spirits is a snap when it comes to engaging people who are already fans of mushrooms—they’re excited to see a favorite culinary ingredient presented in a new way. But even one-time mushroom haters can become converts.
“People, for the most part, are just really curious,” Wendy Rizzo says. “When it comes to people who don’t like mushrooms … usually I find it’s because of the texture, which, of course, you’re not getting in a spirit.”
From the addition of alcohol to complementary botanicals, these spirits present the best things about mushroom character, including—depending on the variety—earthiness, umami, and even some sweetness. Sherry says he finds people are often surprised at just how approachable Isolation Proof’s mushroom gin is.
Across these different spirits, people may know they’re tasting something unique and complex but don’t necessarily realize it’s due to mushrooms at first—a subtlety that lends itself well to cocktails, where umami has become a leading mixology trend.
Block and Starowicz mention a whiskey sour with Veda liqueur, as well as a root-beer float—balancing sweetness with savoriness. Mushroom spirits can be a go-to in classics such as a bloody Mary, while both Sherry and Wendy Rizzo endorse mushrooms’ ability to elevate a martini.
From bartenders looking to tap into buzzy savory cocktails to home cooks, mushroom fans, functional-drink enthusiasts, and anyone compelled by local or foraged products, mushroom spirits offer a wide range of ways to connect with consumers—no magic required.