How to Take Kratom
Kratom is usually taken one of five ways. People swallow the powder and chase it with a drink, stir it into juice or water, fold it into a food like yogurt, swallow it in capsules, or brew it into tea. That is the whole list. What separates them is taste, texture, cost and how easy each one is to carry. This page covers every route except tea, which has its own page.
Here is what’s different about this page. Almost every other guide to taking kratom spends most of its length on how much to take. This one doesn’t give an amount anywhere, and that is on purpose. The serving size printed on the package is the only amount we publish, and it belongs on the package. What we can tell you is how each method works, what customers tell us works, and where published research has something useful to add.
What are the ways to take kratom?
Every route on this page starts with the same thing: dried kratom leaf, milled to a fine powder. The powder can be swallowed, stirred into a drink, mixed into food or packed into a capsule.
We’ve never counted, but toss and wash is the route customers describe to us most. Mixing it into water or juice comes next. Folding it into yogurt or cottage cheese comes up often too.
How do you measure kratom powder?
By weight, on a kitchen scale. A spoon measures volume, and powder is sold and served by weight.
That difference matters more with powder than with almost anything else in a kitchen. A spoonful of fine powder weighs one thing scooped loose and another packed down, and nobody packs a spoon the same way twice. A digital scale that reads in grams doesn’t care how the powder sits. Capsules skip this step, because the portion was set when each one was filled.
What is toss and wash?
Toss and wash means putting kratom powder in your mouth and washing it down with a drink. It is the fastest route and the least pleasant one, because nothing covers the taste.
- Weigh your serving and set it next to a full glass of water or juice.
- Take a mouthful of the drink and hold it.
- Tip the powder into your mouth, onto the liquid.
- Swallow, then drink the rest of the glass.
Putting the liquid in first gives the powder something to land on. Dry powder on a dry tongue sticks to everything and is hard to get down in one swallow. Some people skip that step and put the powder in first. Either works.
Don’t breathe in while there’s powder in your mouth. Kratom powder is milled very fine, and a fine dry powder is easy to inhale by accident. That sets off a coughing fit. Take your breath first, then tip it in.
The grind shapes how this route feels. Ours is milled to 80 mesh, which is at the fine end of what the trade sells. A fine powder feels less gritty than a coarse one, and it also clumps faster when it meets liquid. What a mesh number measures is on Kratom Powder. Ours is at buy kratom powder.
Can you mix kratom powder into water?
Yes, but it won’t dissolve. Kratom powder is milled leaf, and milled leaf doesn’t disappear into water the way sugar does. Stirred into plain water, it forms clumps that float for a moment and then sink.
People tell us plain water is chunky, and they’re right. A shaker bottle or a jar with a lid beats a spoon, because shaking breaks the clumps apart. Drink it right away, before the powder sinks, and swirl the last mouthful so you don’t leave a layer behind.
What is the best juice to mix kratom with?
Full pulp orange juice. It is the most specific thing anyone has told us about taking kratom, and it holds up.
Juice is popular for one reason: it covers the taste. Kratom is bitter and grassy, and a strong juice hides more of that than water can. What most juice can’t hide is the grit. Full pulp orange juice, stirred well, masks the grit and any lumps that are left. Stir hard or shake it in a cup with a lid, the same as with water.
Is there any juice you shouldn’t mix kratom with?
Grapefruit. It is the one juice we’d keep out of the glass.
Grapefruit juice blocks an enzyme called CYP3A4 in the wall of the small intestine. That enzyme breaks many drugs down before they reach the blood, which is why FDA requires grapefruit warnings on some medicines. Laboratory work shows kratom’s main alkaloid, mitragynine, is broken down by the same enzyme family.
Researchers at the University of Florida gave rats purified mitragynine along with a drug that blocks that enzyme family. More mitragynine and more 7-hydroxymitragynine stayed in their blood. The authors wrote that the finding has implications for kratom taken with citrus juices that block the enzyme, and that more work is needed before it can be applied to people.
Nobody has tested grapefruit juice with kratom in people, and we won’t guess how it would go. FDA also lists Seville oranges, pomelos and tangelos as fruits that may act like grapefruit. Ordinary orange juice isn’t on that list. How kratom itself can affect medicines is covered on kratom drug interactions.
Can you mix kratom into yogurt or cottage cheese?
Yes, and folding powder into something thick solves the texture problem a glass of water or juice has.
A thick food holds the powder where you put it. It doesn’t clump the way it does in water, and it doesn’t sink, so the last spoonful isn’t a layer of leaf. Fold it in with a spoon until no streaks of green are left, then eat it. Flavored yogurt hides the bitterness more than plain does. Fruit or honey on top of either one covers more of the taste.
What about smoothies and oatmeal?
Both work, and a smoothie is one of the easiest ways to hide the taste.
A blender breaks up every clump, so a smoothie doesn’t have the grit problem at all. Strong flavors do the rest. Banana, peanut butter, cocoa and frozen berries all cover bitterness well. Add the powder with everything else and blend.
Oatmeal is thick, so it holds powder the way yogurt does, and brown sugar or fruit covers the taste. Stir the powder into your own bowl after the oats are cooked, not into the pot. That way all of it ends up in the bowl you’re eating. Overnight oats work too. Stir it in before the jar goes in the fridge.
Can you put kratom in cookies?
No-bake cookies, yes. Baked ones are a question nobody has answered.
The no-bake kind that works here is the stirred kind. Oats, a nut butter, honey and cocoa, mixed in a bowl, rolled into balls and chilled. Stir the powder in with the dry ingredients so it spreads through the whole batch.
We’d leave the oven out of it. The stability data on our tea page stops at 176 degrees Fahrenheit, well below a baking oven. Nobody has baked kratom and published what came out, so we won’t tell you what happens.
A batch raises a question a glass of juice doesn’t. When powder goes into a whole bowl of dough, it spreads across every piece, and nothing tells you how well it mixed. Mix it in thoroughly, and know how many pieces the batch made.
Then store them like something that isn’t for everyone in the house. A kratom cookie looks exactly like any other cookie. Label them, keep them apart from other food, and keep them where children can’t reach them. Kratom is for adults 21 and over.
How do you take kratom capsules?
Swallow them whole with water, the same as any capsule. The shell does the job that juice and yogurt do on the other routes. You never taste the leaf.
If capsules are hard for you to swallow, one technique has been tested. Researchers at the University of Heidelberg had 151 adults swallow placebo pills, then try a technique on the ones they found hardest. For capsules it is called the lean-forward technique. Put the capsule on your tongue. Take a medium sip of water, but don’t swallow yet. Tip your chin slightly toward your chest, and swallow with your head bent forward. It made swallowing easier in 31 of the 35 tries where it was used, and it made none of them harder.
The capsules in that study were placebos made for the test, not kratom. What was tested was the technique. The same paper notes that tipping your head back to swallow may raise the risk of something going down the wrong way.
A capsule’s shell ages faster than the leaf inside it, and how to store one is on Kratom Capsules. Ours are at buy kratom capsules.
You can also pull a capsule apart and stir the powder into any of the foods above. At that point you are paying capsule prices for powder, and what each format costs per gram is on Kratom Capsules vs Powder.
Where does kratom tea fit?
Tea is its own method with its own page, because it’s the one route that leaves part of the leaf behind. Brewing, straining, lemon, honey and what heat does are all on how to make kratom tea.
That includes stirring powder into warm water with honey and drinking the whole thing. That is tea too, just unstrained.
Does the way you take it change anything?
It changes the taste, the texture, the cost and how easy it is to carry. No published study in people has measured whether it changes anything else.
That includes food. Plenty of pages say kratom should be taken on an empty stomach, or with a meal, and state it as fact. We searched PubMed and Europe PMC, the two main databases of medical research, for a study in people comparing the two. There isn’t one.
The leaf is the same leaf whichever route you pick. Liquid extracts are a different matter. An extract isn’t a way of taking leaf. It’s a different product, concentrated from leaf, and it has its own page at Liquid Kratom Extract. We don’t suggest an extract to anyone new to kratom.
Which way should you choose?
Pick the one you’ll do the same way every time. Capsules if you never want to taste it. Juice, yogurt or a smoothie if you’d rather pay powder prices. Toss and wash if speed matters more than taste.
Whichever route you choose, the serving on the package is the same serving. Weigh it the same way every time. A smoothie or a batch of cookies makes it easy to lose track of how much went in, and no recipe should change that.
Back to Kratom Basics or to the Kratom Guide.