I couldn’t fine an article I was talking about, but there is the scientific study from Brasil on green mould.

http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1517-83822014000400017

I also found an article where the straw was immersed into hot water at 80C temperature. However, they let temperature gradually drop down to 65C.

My experimental jars, which I mentioned in the previous post. This is pure coffee waste inoculated with the small cutoffs made from the clusters of pinheads, which never developed into fully grown fruits. I made sure that the coffe is losely packed and not pressed in. The first jar to the left has the most of empty spaces where air coud penetrate. But the test was initiated 3 weeks ago. The same strain of mushroom developed this much after less then 2 weeks in the mix of coffee waste and the coconut coir.

Hi Euardo,

Thank you very much.

For sterilisation I use my 16QT Presto pressure cooker, where I sterilise bags and mason jars at 15 psi or 121 C. I was doing this last year. I sterilised substrates such as coffee, coffee/coir, BRF and coffee/wood.

But pasteurisation at 67 to 75 C is used for bulk substrates.

Pasteurisation is simpler and much more energy efficient and you use it where you do not need to have fully sterile substrate. Pasteurised substrates contain microbes, which keep moulds in check, thus giving enough time for mycelium to develop. Once developed, mycelium uses its own peroxide to destroy spores of moulds.

In my case, to raise pressure to 15 psi in Presto pressure cooker on 2000W hot plate, takes over 1.5 hour. Sterilisation process then takes further 1 hour. The one hour duration is the time specified on shroomery.org and in a number of papers I read. That means it takes 2kW @ 2.5-3 hours to sterilise.

To pasteurise 3 kilos of coffee by the method described above, it takes only 15 minutes to raise water temperature to 70C. I then drop power down to 500W and the tempeature gradually raises to 75C. At the same time temperature in the centre of the coffee bag gradually rises. Once the target temperature at the centre is reached I further drop power down to 200W. The whole process for substrate of this size takes less than 2 hours.

I even used the wall oven to pasteurise coffee. This is the simplest method, but leaves bad smell in the house. I keep the hot plate outside on the terrace.

Microwave can process only smaller quantites of substrate and is not too practical.

The substrate in my example above is made of 7kg of straw and 3.5 kg of coffee. Trying to sterilise such large substrate would not be practical and would be much less energy efficient.

However, if I was going to produce my own mycelium from spore prints or syringes, I would need to use sterilisation method.

I would also reccomend Adam’s and Eric’s method from the video, which is the most energy efficient and the least costly. I made my substrate above before I joined their course.

At the moment I have 4 test mason jars filled with pure coffee waste, which was neither sterilised, nor pasteurised. I inoculated these jars with stem cut offs from the live white oyster mushroms. One jar was soon attacked by green mould. Three others are doing fine at the moment. I want to see if I can use the unpasteurised coffee waste like Adam and Eric to mix it with the sugar cane straw.

This is another photo that I made few moments ago. I am hoping this will also be the success. I used the stem cut offs from the yellow or golden oyster to inoculate coffee/ coconut coir substrate 50/50. This was just before I joined the course and learned that yellow oyster doesn’t like the coffee much. This trial was started on May 17th. It is obvious that the growth is very slow, but there is no contamination so far and there are a lot primordia on the top.

Not sure that I will grow yellow oyster in the future. The second flush was quite mediocre. I thought that I was doing something wrong, but then I read an article describing this as beiing normal for this strain.

Speaking of the taste of the yellow oyster, since it ws mentioned in the course. I found the omelette recipe with yellow oyter and Dijon mustard. Tastes fantastic.

Hi Adam,

You are absolutely right. This happened mainly because I had another terrarium stocket on top. My terrariums have holes even on the bottom. They are small enough to keep the perlite in, but to et CO2 out. I suspect that additional CO2 was seeping into the bottom terrarium. It was rectified on the day I made the photo. You can see the change on this photo. Bag with mushrroms is now fully uncovered.

Speaking of this, would you be able to identify the mushroom strain. I bough it as white mushroom from one of listed suppliers. My undrestanding is/was that white mushroom is somethin else, also often called Indian oyster. This strain starts with bluish grey caps and then becomes pale. Not sure if this is ever going to get white.  I made this photo few moments ago with my iPad, so the white balance is incorrect. Because of the light colour, it looks more yellow beige, when it is actually pale grey.