When it comes to enjoying your kratom, you have your choice of different forms of consumption, including extract. You hopefully know that kratom extract is stronger than other kratom products, but how much stronger is it? And what do we mean when we say it’s stronger?
How to Determine Kratom Extract Strength
The difference comes down to the alkaloid content. Kratom alkaloids are the part of the plant that delivers the effects that you associate with kratom products. So, the more kratom alkaloids you have, the stronger the effects are.
Put simply, kratom extracts have a lot more kratom alkaloids per gram than other kratom products. That’s why beginners should stick to regular kratom products and it’s best to wait to try extracts until you have more experience with kratom. That way, you will know how much to consume to get the desired effects and better understand how your body reacts to it.
But how do you know how much stronger the kratom extract is? There are two main ways that products will indicate strength.
Determining Strength in Standardized Extracts
Standardized extracts have a standardized amount of mitragynine, the primary alkaloid that’s responsible for kratom’s effects. This amount is usually listed as a percentage of the total amount of kratom extract.
MIT45 GO vs MIT45
Our Go gel pouch, for example, has 150mg of extract with a 65% mitragynine concentration, or 97.5mg of pure mitragynine. Our signature MIT45 shot, by comparison, contains 250mg of extract with a 45% mitragynine concentration, or 112.5mg of mitragynine, different from MIT45 GO. The rest of the extract is composed of other alkaloids or inactive ingredients.
Keep in mind, this is considerably more kratom extract and mitragynine than most users want in a single serving. Thus, we’ve listed these products as having an average reported use of 3 servings.
So, how does this compare to the typical concentration in kratom?
Dried leaves typically have a mitragynine concentration of 0.5 to 2.0%. So, for example, an average serving size of one gram of dried kratom with an alkaloid concentration of 1.5% would have 15mg of mitragynine.
MIT45 Black Label Capsules vs Raw Leaf Capsules
We can more easily make a different comparison with raw leaf and extract kratom capsules:
| One Black Label Capsule with 150mg of 45% extract = 67.5mg of mitragynine in the product |
| One Raw Leaf Capsule with 500mg of a natural 1.5% concentration = 7.5mg of mitragynine |
| One Black Label Capsule is nine times as strong as one Raw Leaf Capsule = 67.5 divided by 7.5 |
How Much Stronger is Our Super K Kratom Extracts?
That said, things get more complicated when you talk about kratom products with a large amount of total kratom extract but a lower mitragynine concentration.
Take our Super K Extra Strong kratom shots, for example. These shots have 1,200mg of kratom extract with a 30% concentration of mitragynine, or 360mg of pure mitragynine per bottle. With a recommended 6 servings per bottle, users get 40mg of mitragynine per serving, comparable to our other kratom extract products.
Nevertheless, our users report that Super K Extra Strong is a noticeably stronger product. No doubt, that’s because the 30% mitragynine extract in our Super K products likely has more of kratom’s other alkaloids. Due to the difficulty of detecting alkaloids that occur in very small quantities, it’s impractical to analyze and report the amounts of every single alkaloid in a kratom extract, although they can contribute to kratom’s effects.
Determining Strength in X Extracts
X extracts are great for comparing the strength of a kratom extract to the raw kratom powder. The number before the X tells you how many grams of kratom went into making each gram of the extract. So, a 50x extract means that each gram of the extract was made using 50 grams of kratom. The downside is that unless you also know the strength of the raw powder and the efficiency of the extraction process used, you won’t know how much mitragynine is in the extract.
The following chart shows some examples:
| Extract Type | Grams of Kratom Used to Make One Gram of Extract | Ratio of Kratom Extract Concentration to Regular Kratom Concentration |
| 10x | 10 grams | 10:1 |
| 50x | 50 grams | 50:1 |
| 100x | 100 grams | 100:1 |
Conclusion
While it’s crucial to read the product label to get information about how strong the extract is, there is no perfect system. The strength of kratom extract can vary, but so too can people’s reactions to kratom, including the kratom response time. This is why we consistently tell people, especially first-time users, to start low and gradually increase their serving size until they find the right amount for them.
References
Unknown Writer. Kratom Drug Profile. European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction. Accessed October 2022.
