I am preparing myself on the extraction of psilocybine/psilocin. I am growing mushies on grain. When I harvest the mushrooms I cut off the bottom with the peatmoss. So I am left with pieces of mushroom with peat moss and a lot of grain-mycelium. It is a waste to throw this away. So I am searching for a method to extract the Psilocybin/Psilocin from it.

I read about methanol and chloroform. But this is hard to get my hands and I try to avoid hightoxic chemicals. So I want to use high percentage liquor. Like in this TEK. But when I am reading threads I do not read convincing rapports of people using this method. Is there anyone who got experience with this and wants to share?

Secondly I only read about mushrooms being used. Haven't read much of people extracting from grainbased mycelium and involvement of peat moss. Is this ok?

Thnx in advance!!

There seems to be some consensus about the use of methanol. I have to figure out how toxic that is. Obviously I want to stay healthy. Here you can see pictures of an extraction using methanol.


Another TEK uses Denatured Alcohol, distilled water, and distilled white vinegar.
And another TEK

p.s. I have to excuse for my lack of knowledge on the subject. The more I look for info the more it seems I am asking a superficial question.

dakkapel: be careful with methanol, it is a deadly poison (don´t mistake it for ethanol, which is "drinkable" alcohol). If you are going to work with methanol, make sure you evaporate it thoroughly.

I've had great luck with simple warm methanol extractions - I just go overboard evaporating it in my dehydrator to make sure it's groovy.

Works like a charm. I wind up with a tar-ish stuff comprised of some fungal sugars, starches and the goodies (But no belly annoying chitin.)

Why not extract with lemon juice and evaporate? Lemon tek seems to be plenty strong? I'd rather not use deadly chemicals to extract...

I'm not sure how the aclohol tec would work with the peatmoss, but from the grain-based mycelium only I don't see why it shouldn't. The only problem I see is that it's not dry matter so you will have lots of volume, which can complicate stuff. Means you will probably have to work with more liquid than is entirely handy...

Lemon-tek does indeed work pretty well but I'm not sure it can be stored as well as crystals.

I suggest you make a variation of the alcohol tek you posted to, from shroomology, and try it. Since you are growing you will probably have more than one tub to test it on. I would try to separate the peatmoss, since I don't think I would like ingesting it, but I guess you can also filter and clean up your product later.

I've done one mushroom extraction and it was a mess, because the crystals attracted lots of moisture when I left them to evap and turned very gooey. I never ended up trying them. Probably the easiest form of handling them once extracted is making a tincture.

Would it be possible to dissolve the lemon tek residues in ethanol? And: Would that preserve the goodies ?

if you use ascorbic acid instead of citric (lemon juice) you can preserve the actives without any ethanol (in fact, at that point i don't think solvent even matters), but i don't know how well it extracts it.


also could you do a heat purge on an extract without degrading it? because if that is the case i think a methanol extract would be ideal.