Exploring the Science of Growing and Testing Cloned Mushrooms
September 23, 2024
The simple answer is: You don’t know unless they’ve been tested! But what exactly are we testing for? What makes a mushroom strong, weak, or somewhere in between? Before we get into the specifics, let’s first appreciate the importance of testing. If you want to know how intense your experience will be, you need to know how strong the mushrooms are. It’s not just about avoiding taking too much. Imagine planning for the ultimate transformative experience – creating the perfect environment, setting aside the ideal time – only to take the mushrooms and feel… nothing. Weak mushrooms can turn what could have been a life-changing, mystical trip into a huge letdown, leaving you with a sense of lost opportunity.
When it comes to microdosing, the risk of weak mushrooms is even harder to spot. Since the effects are meant to be sub-perceptual, you may never realize that you’re not getting the medicine that works, missing out on the subtle yet powerful benefits altogether.
So, how do we define strong, medium, or weak mushrooms? To answer that, we need to understand what the average mushroom strength looks like. Fortunately, we have some incredibly detailed data from a major event in the world of mushrooms: the 2023 Colorado Psychedelic Cup put on by the Psychedelic Club of Denver.
The Colorado Psychedelic Cup is a prestigious event where professional mushroom growers submit their strongest and best-grown mushroom samples to compete for gold. These aren’t just random mushrooms; they represent the best of the best, grown under optimal conditions by some of the most experienced cultivators in the industry.
Each sample submitted is tested using HPLC technology (High-Performance Liquid Chromatography), which gives us precise concentrations of the active ingredients – psilocybin and psilocin. This means we get accurate data on just how potent these mushrooms really are. When you’re looking at data from the Psychedelic Cup, you’re essentially seeing the upper limits of potency from top-tier professional growers who are competing to grow the strongest mushrooms possible.
So, with this in mind, let’s dive into the data. Below, you’ll find a chart showing the distribution of potency across 466 cubensis magic mushroom samples from the Colorado Psychedelic Cup.
The first graph above shows the distribution of total active compounds (psilocybin + psilocin) per gram across 466 samples of magic mushrooms. These compounds are the key to understanding how strong your mushrooms are. Here’s what the data tells us:
Why is this important? Well, the variability in potency means that if you’re not testing your mushrooms, you might be rolling the dice every time you take them. A mushroom weighing the same could have drastically different effects depending on its potency. Testing helps you know whether your dose is going to hit you like a moderate walk in the park or blast you off into the cosmos.
Let’s focus a little more on that median number. The median tells us that half of the mushrooms tested had a potency of 7.2 mg/g or lower. This means that for a large number of people, mushrooms will be in the same general potency range. However, if you get mushrooms from the tail end of the distribution, which are much stronger than the median, your experience could be vastly different.
This spread is exactly why testing for potency is essential. A mushroom that contains 10 mg/g or more of active ingredients is much stronger than the average one and could lead to unexpectedly intense effects, especially if you’re not prepared.
Now that we’ve looked at the overall potency of magic mushrooms, let’s dig into the specific differences between two popular strains: Golden Teacher and Penis Envy of which there were 19 and 49 samples respectively.
In the end, whether you choose Penis Envy or Golden Teacher, the real lesson is that without proper testing, you can never know how strong your mushrooms truly are. A Golden Teacher mushroom could be much stronger than a Penis Envy mushroom, and you would never know it until you took it. Even though growers often believe their mushrooms are potent—based on anecdotal reports—the testing shows that this isn’t something you can rely on. If anecdotal evidence were reliable, we’d expect the mushrooms submitted to cluster on the stronger end of the spectrum. However, what we actually see is the opposite—the mushrooms tend to cluster on the weaker side. If you want to be confident about the strength of the mushrooms you’re taking, whether it’s Golden Teacher or Penis Envy, testing is the only real solution. Trusting scientifically verified results over speculation ensures a consistent and safer experience.
