The short answer
Sun-drying removes water slowly at ambient temperature over 45–70 days, leaving the resin's compound profile intact. Heat-drying does the same job in hours at high temperature and degrades heat-sensitive compounds along the way. A lab report taken afterwards will still look fine, which is why the method is almost never disclosed.
What the two methods actually do
Both methods are trying to achieve the same thing: get the water out. That is the whole job.
Sun-drying does it in open mountain air over 45–70 days. Water leaves slowly, at whatever temperature the day happens to be, and nothing is ever cooked. It is unglamorous and it cannot be rushed.
An industrial oven does it in hours, often above 60°C. Cheaper, faster, scalable, and it works — in the narrow sense that the water leaves.
What differs is everything that was in the resin besides water. Shilajit is a mixture built over centuries, and parts of that mixture are heat-sensitive. Heat them and they change. Nothing dramatic happens, nothing catches fire, and the product still looks like shilajit — it is simply not quite the same material that came out of the rock.
Why nobody puts it on the label
There is no rule requiring it. Drying method is not a regulated disclosure anywhere, so a brand can heat-dry in an afternoon and write "traditionally prepared" on the jar without breaking anything.
And the lab report will not give them away. Test heat-dried shilajit for heavy metals, microbiology and fulvic acid and it passes, because those are not the things heat changed.
So the absence of a claim is the claim. A brand that sun-dries will tell you, at length, because it is the most expensive decision they make. A brand that says nothing about drying is telling you something.
How to tell which one you have
- Texture. Sun-dried resin softens in your hand and stretches. Heat-dried tends to be brittle and glassy, and snaps rather than pulls.
- Response to cold. Sun-dried resin firms up noticeably in a cold room. That responsiveness is a good sign, not a defect.
- Smell. Mineral and earthy against faintly burnt. Once you have smelled both you will not need this list again.
- The question. Ask how many days it was dried for and where. A number and a place is an answer; "traditional methods" is not.
Why our capsules are dried for even longer
Powder for encapsulation has to be drier than resin for a jar, so ours is sun-dried for 100–120 days rather than 45–70 days. That is four months of sunshine per batch, for a bottle of 40 capsules.
Almost every shilajit capsule on the market is made from heat-dried or spray-dried material, because waiting four months is not a business most people want to be in. That is the honest reason the format is unusual.
Questions people also ask
A fulvic acid assay on heat-dried material will typically still return a strong number, which is part of the problem — the test does not capture what changed. The case for sun-drying is about keeping the whole mixture as it was, not about one measured figure.
It costs more because it takes two months of drying beds instead of an afternoon in an oven. Whether that is worth it to you is a fair question — but you should at least know which one you are buying, and at the moment most people do not.
Ours is 45–70 days for resin, drops and gummies, and 100–120 days for the powder that goes into capsules. Anything measured in hours was not sun-dried.