Ok, months later, and a little wiser, I'm ready to re-write gottlieb's book. That said let me say what i've learned so far from you all. I went to a local beer store. Good place. Found lightest malt extract I could. Made 1% malt extract agar, and 1% pdya. Grew golden teacher on these agars swapping until I had a strain of doom, meaning a strong ass strain that seemed to take over everything. Now, I'm the type who feels small scale is best, so I didn't do gallon carboys, though could very easily have, but was afraid of contams. So I got an aquarium aspirator and tubing from wally world, along with some $1.00 tupperware square ripoffs and a hepa filter refill for hepa filter air containers. Total investment since I couldn't fit other shit in my pockets, maybe $10, was a while ago. Bought some head gasket sealant from autozone, another $5.00. Now, I made a little box for the aspirator with only holes drilled for power cord and tubing sealed with gasket sealant. (think it's like silicone or something.) This was my source of aspiration. Drilled 2 holes in tops of my liquid jars , one filled with polyfil, other with nothing. Filled with %1 malt extract liquid. Pushed tubing through hole without sealing so I could reuse. In future, may use those great little filter tops that allow gas escapage instead of the poly fill. inoculated liquid with mega GT agar scraping, and let aspirator go 24/7 for about a week. Good results, almost looked exactly like gottlieb's quart jar mycelium pics. Only filled quart jar half up for fear of boiling over and stuff. Could have made third hole with glass tube and seal for inoculation, but was trying to be cheap. Only took 3 tries with same jar to get good results. In the future, I'm going to use an inline filter from mushroom magic, and try some azurescens grown on malt, and add a bit of bark from DMT tree to attempt potency upgrade. This jar that was fully colonized was dumped in a koolaid mixture without extraction, and gave 5 people good body buzzes. It can be done, and soon, I'll have a full fledged tech up that will put gottlieb's to shame. Till then, just wanted to say, it can be done, and Liquid mycelium takes less time for a smaller yield. I'll sacrifice yield for the ability to make up a dose in a week, and easily expanding to 25 jars a week, making 200 doses a month, which if extracted properly, could be a nice yield. Thansk to all who educated me on here and thanks for your great ideas, I promise a larger scale production method soon, using a 5 gallon carboy set with proper eq, therefore increasing yield. It can be done people. Pics would be posted, but I exposed the film cause I'm a dumb ass, so next time, I'll post them, from agar to final. Gottlieb was on right track, just needed some tweaking, and just one question for the mycophiles here: Would oxygen introduction into the medium from an oxygen tank be as good or better than an aspirator? Seems to me it would, and it would cut down contams, cause I found an oxygen tank minus regulator for like $12.00 locally that could make up to 15-20 gallons of wine, which would theoretically be large amounts of said mycelium. If I am wrong on this, tell me now. Till then, PLUR and good luck!
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