How To Dry Magic Mushrooms

Magic mushrooms are great, so it's always good to have some on hand. In order to achieve this, we need a means to store them. Lasting only a day or two fresh, we must dry our mushrooms if we want to keep some tucked away for the future. Here we provide three easy and accessible methods for drying magic mushrooms at home.

Magic mushrooms are wonderful organisms, and if we pick them wild or cultivate them at home, we can find ourselves with a huge amount of them. Taking them fresh is fantastic, but often we’ve got a lot left over.

Full of moisture and prone to rot, mushrooms don’t last long in their fresh state. Fortunately, drying magic mushrooms is easy and offers a reliable solution for long-term storage. If done properly, they can last a very long time indeed!

WHY DRY MAGIC MUSHROOMS?

Drying magic mushrooms is absolutely essential to long-term, or even fairly short-term, storage. If you want them to last longer than a day or two, then you must dry them!

Not only is drying the best and only storage solution for magic mushrooms, but it’s the starting point for many different methods of consumption. Mushroom tea, lemon tek, and blue honey all require dried mushrooms. So once you’ve dried your shrooms, that doesn’t mean you’re bound to a bleak future of chewing up cracker-dry fungi every time you want to take yourself on a psychedelic adventure. Instead, see it as a starting point for several delicious ways to take shrooms.

HOW TO DRY MAGIC MUSHROOMS

There are quite a few ways to dry magic mushrooms, but the three listed below are the simplest, and should be accessible to nearly everyone—so long as you have access to some air. Two of the methods require a food dehydrator and an oven, respectively, with the former being the best method available (but by no means essential!).

Note: psilocybin begins to break down at around 72.5°C. Therefore, it’s essential to keep any method below this temperature if you want to retain the potency of your shrooms.

DRYING MAGIC MUSHROOMS IN A FOOD DEHYDRATOR

This is the best method for drying mushrooms. Not only does it basically guarantee cracker-dry shrooms, but it’s cool enough that they won’t lose any potency. If you can afford to buy a food dehydrator, we’d seriously recommend doing so. And if you intend to cultivate shrooms on a regular basis, then a food dehydrator is basically essential. It will soon pay for itself in terms of effectiveness and ease when processing large amounts of mushrooms.

Depending on the size of the mushrooms, 12–24 hours at a low temperature setting should suffice. When you think they’re done, give them a squeeze. If the caps and stems are brittle and feel totally dry, then you should be good! If they still feel soft and flexible, they could probably do with more time.

DRYING MAGIC MUSHROOMS IN AN OVEN

This is perhaps the most accessible option, but it can go wrong. Spread your mushrooms on a baking tray lined with baking paper or foil, and heat the oven to a low temperature of around 30°C. Place your tray of shrooms in the oven, and leave the door ajar.

Exactly how long this process takes is difficult to assess, but, as always, you can be sure they’re “done” when the stems and caps are cracker-dry. Fan ovens work better for the mushroom drying process as they promote airflow, but any should work so long as the door is ajar and the heat is low.

Note: mushrooms can stick to whatever surface they’re on as they dry, so it’s good to move them around once or twice during the process.

Overall, the oven method is a good option if you’ve got a single harvest of shrooms. However, if you intend to dry mushrooms on a regular basis, then using an oven would quickly become wasteful—both in terms of money and resources. You’ll quickly exceed the price of a food dehydrator by keeping the oven on for hours at a time.

AIR DRYING MAGIC MUSHROOMS

Depending on the space and time available to you, this method may be more suitable than the above, but maybe not. If you have an airing cupboard, or the weather is warm and dry, or you can place them in a room that is reliably heated, air drying is a great option. But it won’t work in a damp shed!

You have the choice to either hang your shrooms up, or place them on mesh or cardboard.

To hang, use a needle and thread to attach many shrooms to a single thread, then hang them somewhere with good airflow. Make sure they’re not packed together, as this will make for inconsistent drying and could encourage rot.

Alternatively, space them on a metal mesh screen or piece of cardboard (mesh is better) and place in an area with good airflow. With either method, using a fan to blow a continual stream of air over them will speed up the process and tease out the final molecules of moisture.

This method could take several days, though it depends on the environmental factors of your drying room. So check on them occasionally and wait until they’re cracker dry before moving them into their permanent storage vessel.

HOW TO STORE MAGIC MUSHROOMS

Once you’ve dried your shrooms, you need to store them appropriately. This means keeping them somewhere airtight and moisture free. Dry mushrooms will absorb moisture from their surroundings, and will lose potency as a result. So it’s crucial to store them well.

Some options are:

• Ziplock bag or baggy (not great for long-term storage)
• Airtight jar (such as a Kilner jar)
• Vacuum-sealed (perfect for long-term storage or large amounts, but can’t be resealed once opened)

In most cases, an airtight jar will suffice, and can be opened and closed at will. Whichever method you opt for, place some silica gel humidity packs in with your mushrooms, as these will pull residual moisture out of the shrooms and from the air.

Then, simply place your storage vessel in a cool, dry place. Heat and light can degrade the potency of your shrooms, so you want to keep them away from these conditions as much as possible.

HOW LONG DO DRIED MAGIC MUSHROOMS LAST?

Properly dried magic mushrooms can last indefinitely. In theory, totally dried, vacuum-sealed shrooms stored in a cool, dark environment shouldn’t really lose potency. However, things are rarely perfect.

Dried shrooms stored in a ziplock bag probably have a shelf life of around 6 months, and they will degrade. With those stored in jars, it’s harder to say. The best way to assess whether they’ve lost potency, without taking them, is to feel them. If they still feel brittle and dry, then they’re probably still strong. If they’re soft, they may have lost potency. Figuring out exactly how much potency they’ve lost, however, is a guessing game, without consuming them.

But in general, well-dried and properly stored magic mushrooms last a long time.

HOW TO DOSE DRIED MAGIC MUSHROOMS

When reading about dosing magic mushrooms, generally the recommendations are laid out based on dry mushrooms, as opposed to fresh. In this case, a normal dose will range from anywhere between one gram at the low end to five grams at the (very) high end. For most people, between one and two grams is adequate, with doses of three grams and upwards moving into the territory of a very powerful psychedelic experience.

Comparing this to dosing fresh mushrooms, you may be surprised at just how different the recommendations are. Mushrooms lose 90% of their weight when fully dry. So one gram of dried shrooms would equate to 10 grams fresh. Therefore, it’s important to know the difference before you eat them! You don’t want to experience a trip that is way too weak or far too much.

DRIED MAGIC MUSHROOMS: ADVENTURE’S ALWAYS CLOSE BY

If you intend to hold onto your magic mushrooms for more than a couple of days at most, then you must dry them. Once dried, and if done so properly, they can last a very long time, meaning that a trip is available to you whenever you want it.

As with all things, taking proper care throughout the drying process will make the difference between meagre and ultra-potent mushrooms. Dry them poorly or store them in improper conditions, and you’ll find that, when you come to take them, they offer little in the way of a trip. Dry and store them well, however, and they’ll retain their full potency for a long time!