[This message has been edited by Condi1 (edited October 06, 2000).]

[This message has been edited by Condi1 (edited October 06, 2000).]

quote:

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Originally posted by Condi1:
What!?,
No one dealing with liquid malt extract?
Was hoping to find someone using tek to compare results. Any post will be greatly appreciated.

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I innoculated liquid malt (4%) with spore
syringes from Hawk. Equadors and Pan Trops
were both tried and tremendous growth was
seen after several days. The cultures are
in the frig now as I also started cultures
on agar and used those to go from rye to straw bulk culture.
Do you want to use the liquid as innoculum or harvest the mycelium directly?

I modified a neat tech to innoculate the jars. Used red RTV to glue a small piece of filter patch over 1/2 hole in lid and also used it to create a cannula. (Filled a 1/8 inch innoculation hole with RTV) The Red RTV is autoclavable and really sticks a filter patch to metal well.

Sorry about not trying the innoculum yet but good luck if you try.

[This message has been edited by Condi1 (edited October 06, 2000).]

I've been adding 1.5 Tbs malt, 1 tsp dextrose and about 1/2 tsp of fine ground substrate (rice) to almost 2 cups of water into a re-sealable pasta sauce jar (leaving enough room to shake well). Then steaming for 45 minutes (not a pressure cooker), letting it cool in the water bath, then later scraping a small amount of spores directly onto the surface, re-closing it and lightly shaking it the first time just enough to soak and sink the spores. All this is done in what seems to me like a contaminant free environment. Then after 3 or 4 days of warm darkness and daily shaking, I see lots of white cloudy stuff, mostly on the bottom. This is sucked up into a sterile syringe and injected into prepared rice substrate in jars. Sounds good to me, but most of the time there is no colonization in my jars.

Maybe that's where I'm going wrong with the liquid medium. Should I be putting in more malt? I am using distilled water.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I may still have contamination problems since the jars that don't grow usually smell yeasty and not schroomy. Maybe I should boil the distilled water for a few minutes before adding the dry ingredients, or invest in a good pressure cooker. Help.

GT

[This message has been edited by Condi1 (edited October 06, 2000).]

[This message has been edited by Condi1 (edited October 06, 2000).]

One time for experimental purposes, not knowing what was going to happen, I literally dumped some of this liquid into a small pot of fluffy cooked (as in ready-to-eat) rice. I put the lid on and stuck it up on a shelf for three days. The lid was NOT sealed by the way. When I opened it three days later I almost could not even see the individual rice grains. It was completely overrun by mycelium and a strong, mushroomy smell greeted me. That was VERY encouraging. I stirred it up (sterile spoon) and let it sit another week and although it had grown more, I also noticed that yeasty smell (probably got contaminated when I opened it) and it started to look yellow. Ok, end of experiment. I didn't want to eat it or try to case it (being contaminated), so I spread it out on a cookie sheet, dried it slowly in the oven, ground it up fine in my coffe grinder, soaked it for a 2 days in methanol, strained and squeezed out the liquid, threw the old rice away, evaporated the liquid completely (no smell) and had this beautiful, translucent, caramel colored candy on the bottom of the dish. It reminded me of windowpane acid. Not knowing the concentration of alkaloids in this stuff (and pretty certain it couldn't be a lot) , I ate a small amount of it and felt almost nothing. hmmm.... So feeling brave and foolish, I ate the whole bunch of it the next day and experienced a classic level 2 shroom trip. Wow! that's pretty cool. So the liquid mycelium really does work. And it was tooooo easy!

So.. that's the end of the story and the beginning of my interest in getting this liquid starte medium to work. Now it is almost a total flop after I get it into the jars. What's up?

Stick with this thread y'all and let's get this perfected. I'm going to be super sanitary on this next batch and go back to basics like you suggested Condil.

Honey makes a lot of sense and has a very natural, "health food" feel to it. Keep it simple. I'd like to develop a very down to earth tek that works in my kitchen and green house. Like, "watcha cookin'?" ... "Oh, nothin' ... just some granola in the oven to go with my fresh strawberries from the garden and here are some magic mushroom spores growing like mad in honey water which I'm getting ready to add to the brown rice." ... then a month later, I go and pick my first flush of shrooms from a tray in my green house and dry them along side my dill, basil and ganja. None of this secret lab stuff.

Am I dreaming?

[This message has been edited by Condi1 (edited October 06, 2000).]

One time for experimental purposes, not knowing what was going to happen, I literally dumped some of this liquid into a small pot of fluffy cooked (as in ready-to-eat) rice. I put the lid on and stuck it up on a shelf for three days. The lid was NOT sealed by the way. When I opened it three days later I almost could not even see the individual rice grains. It was completely overrun by mycelium and a strong, mushroomy smell greeted me. That was VERY encouraging. I stirred it up (sterile spoon) and let it sit another week and although it had grown more, I also noticed that yeasty smell (probably got contaminated when I opened it) and it started to look yellow. Ok, end of experiment. I didn't want to eat it or try to case it (being contaminated), so I spread it out on a cookie sheet, dried it slowly in the oven, ground it up fine in my coffe grinder, soaked it for a 2 days in methanol, strained and squeezed out the liquid, threw the old rice away, evaporated the liquid completely (no smell) and had this beautiful, translucent, caramel colored candy on the bottom of the dish. It reminded me of windowpane acid. Not knowing the concentration of alkaloids in this stuff (and pretty certain it couldn't be a lot) , I ate a small amount of it and felt almost nothing. hmmm.... So feeling brave and foolish, I ate the whole bunch of it the next day and experienced a classic level 2 shroom trip. Wow! that's pretty cool. So the liquid mycelium really does work. And it was tooooo easy!

So.. that's the end of the story and the beginning of my interest in getting this liquid starte medium to work. Now it is almost a total flop after I get it into the jars. What's up?

Stick with this thread y'all and let's get this perfected. I'm going to be super sanitary on this next batch and go back to basics like you suggested Condil.

Honey makes a lot of sense and has a very natural, "health food" feel to it. Keep it simple. I'd like to develop a very down to earth tek that works in my kitchen and green house. Like, "watcha cookin'?" ... "Oh, nothin' ... just some granola in the oven to go with my fresh strawberries from the garden and here are some magic mushroom spores growing like mad in honey water which I'm getting ready to add to the brown rice." ... then a month later, I go and pick my first flush of shrooms from a tray in my green house and dry them along side my dill, basil and ganja. None of this secret lab stuff.

Am I dreaming?

[This message has been edited by Condi1 (edited October 06, 2000).]

I've only been doing this for a few months, but I'll tell you what worked for me. I took a 1/2 pint jar, filled it with water (tap) and 1 teaspoon of honey. Taped up 3 of the 4 holes in the lid, covered the top w/ foil and then pressure cooked the mixture for 30 minutes. After it cooled, I innoculated the jar with 5 cc from a home-made Eq syringe, then agitated the mixture once or twice a day. I re-taped all the holes with duct tape because I knew that the masking tape would get all soggy from agitating the liquid. Three days later growth started and a week after that, the jar was full of mycellium and I was a happy camper!

Very simple. And like I said, I innoculated two dozen jars with zero contams (so far. they're only about 80% colonized right now.)

The question then is, did my jars benefit by faster colonization? Unfortunately, I've always innoculated at 4 places, but with this honey mycellium I only innoculated at 1 place, to reduce contams. First signs of growth were two days after innoculation, which is fast, but it's been 2 1/2 weeks since then and my jars are still not quite done. But I guess that's pretty fast for innoculating at only one place.

That's all I can think of. Seems way too simple. I still have 7/8 of the liquid mycellium jar sitting in the refrigerator waiting for the next crop!

GT

[This message has been edited by GorgeousTortoise (edited January 13, 2000).]

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Empty your cup so that it may be filled; become devoid to gain totality

[This message has been edited by Condi1 (edited October 06, 2000).]

[This message has been edited by Condi1 (edited October 06, 2000).]

Back to the subject at hand. I have a 2 day old little jar of honey water, gulf coast spores and a capsule of 5-HTP for fun. The Ecuadors should work the same, but I've never tried them. It has wispy growth mostly on the bottom and getting a bit cloudy throughout. Of course the liquid is light yellow/brown. Trying to be super sterile this time, I poked a hole in the lid before mixing it up, then taped it shut when I took it out of the steamer. I cooked it for a whole hour because it's not a pressure cooker. The jar will never be openned again, I'll just suck the liquid up through the hole.

This stuff is going to be used to inoculate some super clean substrate jars. I'm doing things to this new batch that I never have before. I'm trying to have no jars wasted by contamination, and get them to colonize very fast. Does anybody have ideas on when is the best time to use the liquid mycelium? I figure 3 or 4 days ought to be plenty since by then it is very cloudy.

Although you could make up a barrel of this stuff, let it grow for a week, then extract the alkaloids from the mycelium, it's a lot nicer to see the mushrooms growing and use them... don't ya think?

[This message has been edited by TriGuy (edited January 15, 2000).]

[This message has been edited by Condi1 (edited October 06, 2000).]

[This message has been edited by Condi1 (edited October 06, 2000).]

[This message has been edited by Condi1 (edited October 06, 2000).]

My jar of honey mycellium has contaminated in the past few days, so it lasted about 12 days. I only decided to put it in the refrigerator (holes covered w/ duct tape and sealed in a ziplock) about 5 days ago, though. It may have lasted a bit longer had I refrigerated it earlier.

But, of the 20 jars I innoculated from the solution, I have zero contams.

GT