Hello chums! Hope everyone's having a nice little liberty cap season, going out there and picking and disposing of all that evil, thought-inspiring nature safely into a bin or something.

Inspired by something that Chris from MycoPunks said to me when we were chatting some months back, I’m going to try and write a little bit about the origins of all the various magic mushroom phenotypes that I sell, in a bit more detail than on the product pages. I don’t think it particularly fits there, as really most people don’t actually care about the history of it all (although I do reserve the right to change my mind about this at a later date). In terms of story, some of them are super interesting, some of them are just a bit normal, and some of them have almost zero credible information that’s discoverable! Regardless, I’m going to try and chat about them all over a series of blog posts, and I’ll add a little link into the product pages. I’m nice like that.

Golden Teacher mushrooms, growing happily outside in nature ;)

Golden Teacher mushrooms are the most well-known of the various Psilocybe cubensis phenotypes, and seem to have been around forever, so where exactly did they come from? Frustratingly, no-one actually seems to have a concrete answer, literally because they’ve been around forever and no-one really seemed to have made many distinctions as far as phenotypes went back in the good old days of 40-odd years ago. I’ve found some unsourced posts online saying they may well have originated in the Gulf Coast over in Florida, where Psilocybe cubensis mushrooms grow in the wild due to the suitable environmental conditions. This is totally plausible, but it’s not as definitive as I’d have liked.

As you’d guess from the “golden” part of the name, it likely comes from the often golden colour of the cap, but then again that’s a common P cubensis trait, so that doesn’t really help narrow it down much at all. The teacher bit, most probably because you can learn a lot about yourself if you’re having that kind of introspective experience. That stuff seems super obvious, as it’s a pretty descriptive name, unlike Z-Strain. Like Z-Strain though, the name just seems to have appeared from somewhere. Golden Teachers have become almost the default mushroom spores for people to study (and grow in countries where it’s legal to do so), and the mental picture of a Golden Teacher mushroom is pretty much what gets conjured up in the brain when people think about the kind of magic mushrooms that people grow at home (in legal countries: do not get what I’m saying confused). Golden Teacher is apparently used to describe Psilocybe cubensis in general in South Africa, it’s like calling a vacuum cleaner a hoover regardless of brand, sort of thing.

Honestly at this point I’m going to have a little interlude and say there are so many bullshit articles clearly written by AI about these mushrooms out there that just spout the same absolute nonsense. Shame on you motherfuckers that have done this, because I’m now here trying to trawl through all your horseshit and I can guarantee you that even skim-reading it I’m putting more time in than you did in writing it, and none of it is correct. Absolute fucking twats, you’re poisoning actual knowledge with your self-reinforcing bullshit boxes just for clicks. Eat a bucket of metal dicks.

"A whole bucket, you say?"

Cough. Anyway, another website I found that I’m not going to bother linking to (because again, it’s completely unsourced and I’ve tried cross-referencing it and found nothing) claim that a man named “Hutchinsons” from Holyoke Community College first discovered it back in the 1970s, down in Guyana. The dates would make sense, as it’s in the 80s that people started to try and practice home cultivation in meaningful numbers, but as there’s nothing else to back this up, who knows? Did this actually happen? Like before, the timeframe and environmental conditions would work, but I think it’s more probable that what we call Golden Teacher is just the default expression of Psilocybe cubensis, that’s the standard issue type, and the others are the ones where people have put a bit of work in to try and select out for different traits. What’s important to throw in here, for people newer to this sort of thing, is that the difference between a phenotype and a strain (pardon the non-scientific language) is that when you’re talking about weed strains, for example, you’re talking about a type of marijuana with clear genetic differences, that you can observe with genetic sequencing. 

This doesn’t exist with the Psilocybe cubensis magic mushroom spores, as they’re not genetically diverse at all, rather they just have different traits that have been selected for during cloning, and they’re not nearly as stable due to the tendency of mushrooms to mutate quickly in very few generations (this is why cultivating mushrooms is fun, because you can get mad results very quickly with some tomfoolery). I suppose the easiest way to sum it up is “are all the various phenotypes different?” – yes, but they’re not genetically distinct in a massively profound way. Even something as bizarre as the Enigma variant is a Psilocybe cubensis, at the end of the day.

And that quite literally is all the information that’s out there about this insanely popular type of magic mushroom. Mad really, when you consider the fact that as far as magic mushroom spores go, Golden Teachers are very popular and they’ve been popular for a long time: you’d think there would be much more information out there, but I guess it’s just one of those things that has been lost in time to the pre-internet days, like woods porn.

Save your local woods: plant a jazz mag today

So: that’s all I could find this time around. If you’d like to buy some spore syringes in the UK (or abroad), obvs I’d be quite happy to help as long as you follow all your local laws and only grow them if you live in one of the cool dude countries where you’re allowed to do that, and I’ve got a decent and ever-growing range of cubensis that you can find here, or some jazzier ones here and here!

Next up, I’ll probably try and find out more about where the B+ magic mushroom phenotype came from in some more detail, so if that’s your jam, keep your eyes peeled for the next blog post!

Cheers now! OTC