First thing to keep in mind is: the distribution of active substances vary greatly, even in mushrooms that are the same size and that grew side by side on the same soil. Variations of up to 500% are not unheard of. So to be sure you are not underdosing / overdosing, you will have to determine the potency of your mushrooms and/or your extract. Since there is no simple (i.e. without some chromatography) way to know the potency beforehand, you will have to test the extract. That's why I usually make a larger batch, so I can even out differences between mushrooms and have enough extract to do a calibration test on.
But WHAT extract? Well, actually, you can make
different extracts out of your AM... It all depends, on what you want to do. Are you keen on keeping the ibotenic acid (e.g. for pain medication)? Do you want to convert most of the stuff into muscimol (for the GABA-application or shamanic purposes)? These questions define, how you want to dry and then treat your AM.
Drying (especially air drying) isn't a bad thing. It actually keeps you all the doors open for later processing, especially, if the AM was air dried without much sun light ( because of the conversion of ibotenic acid into muscazone). With air drying, you get fairly long storable AM, that can keep the ibotenic acid; so it's actually good raw material. I dry mine in a dehydrator at 40-45 degree celsius, so nowhere near the conversion temperature, and I can use them for whatever sinister plans I have in my mind
If you want to go the muscimole route, just grab your dried AM and toss them in simmering water with some citric acid (lemon juice works as well). At 70 degree Celsius the citric acid will convert the ibotenic acid into muscimol. Just check that your water has the necessary pH < 4. pH test stripes are available on amazon or your next pharmacy. Grinding the AM up beforehand can improve the extraction process (but it can make the filtering afterwards harder). The resulting extract contains up to 80% of the original ibotenic acid in the form of muscimol.
If you just boil them in neutral water (and you even don't HAVE to boil it, because all the relevant agents are fairly watersoluble even at room temperature.... you just could make a cold water extract), you will get a tea of ibotenic acid with a tiny muscimol fraction. That's not necessarily a bad thing... cooled down, you could use it as pain medication externally - works really swell... hundred thousands of Russians use it everyday with great success on back pain and arthritis.
But if you
drink this ibotenic acid tea, your body will have to do the conversion work, which means, your (already uncertain) dosage will suffer the so-called "first pass effect" - resulting in a much less reliable effect. And since you don't really know about the potency of your mushrooms beforehand, overdosing to compensate the first pass effect is not a good idea - you could very well bite off more than you can chew. But you could still drink your own urine after you ingested that extract
(Yep, that's what the shamans of old did... They overdosed AM, let their body do the conversion, and everyone else received a portion of their urine, which was -thanks to the first pass effect- full of muscimol. Nowadays, this procedure is not to everybodies taste anymore
).
Even easier should be the conversion with DMSO. According to the patent posted in this forum, DMSO converts ibotenic acid at room temperature over night into muscimol. So about 2 ml DMSO on half a litre filtered cold water extract should do the trick (never tried that myself, but I'm working on it).
You could also take your (fresh or air dried) mushroom and dump them into a bottle of 40% vodka (or any other 40% booze) and place them at your window for 4 weeks, filter it and store it. This method was very common in the eastern part of Prussia. A small shot glass had definitely an effect that surpassed the pure alcohol effect.
However - no matter what method you used, you still have no clue about the potency of that extract. There are just 2 way of finding out:
1. Try in small increasing steps. Start small and work round to your "psychoactive" dose. That is your reference dosage
for this batch and only for this batch. You will have to determine your reference dosage for every single batch you produce. This method especially applies to the DMSO route, since it could be quite dangerous to boil DMSO solutions down.
2. Filter the extract as good as you can (at least through a coffee filter), then boil the extract down until you get a weighable dry residue. If you weigh this residue, you could get a good estimation, how potent your extraction is, but you need a decent milligram scale. The dry residue is very storable and could be very easily brought into solution again, and this time, you have a better idea about the potency.
I hope I could be of any help.