Cant find any brown rice flour locally and online is my last resort. Does anybody know if organic whole wheat flour can be a substitute in making a verm/BRF(whole wheat flour) tek style cake?

I don't think you'd want to use wheat flour. It wouldn't have the right consistency, and would be too sticky. Just my guess.

What you can do is get some brown rice from the store and grind it in a coffee grinder, or some other grinding device. It may not be quite as fine as BRF you'd buy, but should work just the same!

Yup... just grind the rice in a coffee grinder nice and fine.

I've also used rye flour successfully in the PF Tek

hey hopefull,

look into some alternatives to PF tek - if you have a pressure cooker and decent steril working area you should be able to pull off starting from rye or other grains like millet/bird seed or even better first doing liquid culture and then moving to grains. The grains you can fruit as you would PF, or just out of the jars, or you can go on to doing bulk grows. It's not THAT much more work and anyway you get more yield. You just have to do a little more research on the various techniques to keep the mushrooms happy. Cubensis strains afaik are quite easy to please, so they're a great place to start.

Just a thought.

Hello enoon

Seems like a perfect place and time to post this

Im a bit curious as to how you would suggest making a LC. Swim wants to use good honey and thought the solution must be at a 4% ratio, without caramelizing the honey. He knows to have a filtered gas exchange hole (ie a plastic mason jar lid, with 2 holes drilled through, with about 2 inches of automotive tubing superglued then silicon pasted around the hole/ tube connection, with polyfill not quite tightly in the tubing) and a silicon pasted inoc hole. He put this on a mason jar, brought honey to 4% in water, and poured in jar. He then pressure cooked on low (i think thats 9 psi) for about fifteen minutes. It was never knocked up, yet either the honey caramelized or there was something growing in it. Any tips?

Thanks for your time

Btw, for the OP, monotubs are the best invention. Ever.

I've had bad experience with honey and thus switched to dextrose / malt extract solutions as explained in the shroomery LC basics page. This doesn't caramelize ever, so I PC it for 15 min @ 15 PSI.

I've also had good experience allowing no gas exchange, i.e. only putting two holes in the lid and filling them both up with silicone. The only time I break the seal is when I'm putting spores in or when I'm taking the myc out. I use sterile syringe with polyfill inside as an air-port in one hole ONLY WHILE putting the spores in or taking the myc out. Otherwise the jar is sealed. There is some air in it anyway and this seems to be enough for the myc.

Important is to put lots of little pices of glas in the jar to cut up the myc so you can suck it up with the syrringe.

I don't think polyfill is enough to keep all the bad stuff out with LC. I've tried with ependorf tubes filled with polyfill but since I had to shake the jars they got wet inside and thus did no loger provide a sealing effect. I would simply leave about 1/4 of the jar filled with air and not worry about FAE. at leats that's what worked for me.

I seem to remember a technique for providing air to a jar with two ports like Enoon talks about. In one, you could put a syringe with the plunger removed and generous amounts of polyfill inserted in the tube. Wet the outermost layer of fill with a little alcohol. In the other port you can attach another syringe, this one complete. Draw air out of the jar with the complete syringe, and the other syringe will allow air to enter the jar, and will filter the incoming air, too.

But, like Enoon said, no FAE should be fine.

How large of LC jars have you done this way, Enoon?

1. There is enough air in a jar for one liquid culture run. You may shake after a while to aerate the lq and to create more innoculation points, so the lq finishes faster.

2. If you are not working in a sterile environment, LQ can be a hit or miss. You may think you have tons of jars of workable solution, but mold looks white at first in lq too....

3. Therefore, i would suggest do work in a still air / glove box. You can drop the spore right in or use a spore syringe.

4. Check health food stores for organic rice. It doesn't blend too well and requires a lot of sifting and reblending. Coffee grinder might work better but make sure it'S not a weak one. I've heard about people damaging them by grinding rice.

5. Honey works fine, but only if you do not get the "creamed" variety because it might contain additional fats and other additives. Only Pressurecook for half an hour max and there should not be any caramelisation. Less is more with honey and LQ. A small drop is sufficient for say 250ml. The solution does not have to be yellow as too much sugar actually isn't good for mycelium either.



Or use a bigger needle.

Id say instead of using BRF cakes try to find a proper monotub tek starting from inoculating WBS or even rye grain. Those help with a bigger surface area when trying to colonize the jars as you can shake them to break apart and strengthen the mycelium as well as allow you to turn into a few different methods of fruiting easier as opposed to the BRF cakes.