Booooonjour! Just thought I’d try and get a bit of a blog post in during a brief moment of quiet respite!

I’ve had a little trip up the road, up to the godforsaken wilderness of Gloucester to go and see the lovely MycoPunks team and do some normal work like what a normal person would do. Obviously whenever I go away (often on trips to try and find headshops that wanna stock cool mycology products) my own charming (small) team back at home keep all the orders flying out, so all the Golden Teachers, B+’s, and various other rad spore stuff is all still doing what it needs to do and landing through your letterbox.

if you give it a thumbs-up it'll taste better

It’s been quite a laugh, really; I tend to just keep myself mostly to myself in terms of work, so I just graft away knocking out all the spore syringes (and writing silly bollocks) and over the years I’ve gotten so used to it being my job that I kinda like going somewhere else and doing someone else’s work. I suppose it’s a bit like that whole “seeing how the sausage is made” analogy.

My business is very busy (thanks everyone, much appreciated!), and obviously I mostly sell spore syringes – yeah, a little bit of merch as well, I grant you, but the bulk of it is essentially one type of product. There’s thirty or so variants, but the production method is virtually the same, so it’s quite easy to keep up with things as there’s only really one plate to keep spinning. Not so up at MycoPunks – they’re producing multiple different types of grain in different sizes, multiple different types of substrate in different sizes, various bundles of these things, custom bulk orders, all the extra bits people might need (hygrometers, thermometers, gloves, all the sundry items), and honestly I don’t know how they manage to keep all their plates spinning because motherfucker it’s a complex set of things to produce.

Back in the day I’ve made my own CVG at home, which followed a broadly similar recipe, but the scale of what they’re doing requires a different approach entirely. It’s not a million miles off being back on a building site – massive plastic troughs that reminded me of having to pour loads of cement in them and getting it lifted onto the scaffold by surly forklift drivers. They needed an extra set of hands and I’m happy to get stuck in, so with a bit of help from Andreas I made about 80 bags of pasteurised CVG for them. To be honest I struggled with folding the bags neatly because it’s something I’ve never done before, but I eventually made them look slightly less “rustic” – still a million miles off the MycoPunks guys being able to just fold them neatly in about four seconds.

The lovely Kev adorning my crotch with stickers

I dunno if it’s the ADHD or what, but it’s interesting as fuck, to me, to look at a product that I normally take for granted and thinking “I wonder what all the steps were to take this from a few raw materials to a finished product and how many people have been involved along the way”. I actually worked at a Burger King very briefly quite a lot of years back mainly because I was curious on how fast food restaurant franchises operated behind the scenes. Man, that was a fucking terrible job, I probably should’ve just read a book about it instead.

Going back to the MycoPunks chat, the CVG’s just one tiny part of the whole operation. There’s a couple of lab spaces for all their cloning/liquid culture/general agar work, multiple autoclaves and multiple pressure cookers for when you need sterilisation over pasteurisation, all sorts of stuff because most stuff they produce requires specific techniques and equipment to produce. I’m genuinely quite impressed with how good they all are at their jobs and the sheer amount of mycological goodness that they’re cranking out. It’s a lot. I’m glad that I just make spore syringes because although banging out hundreds and hundreds of syringes can get quite tedious, at least I can adjust the temperature and the spore syringes aren’t heavy! Haha fuck me, you wouldn’t believe that I used to get up at 6am every day for years to go and labour on a building site, or do double shifts in really busy kitchens, would ya? Still, I’m 43 now, it’s not a bad thing to have changed career into something a bit lighter on the body.

I filmed a little video walkthrough of their space, just because I thought it might be interesting to some of their customers and seeing as I’ve got the camera, might as well use it!