How We Make Mycelium Grain Spawn & Liquid Culture | Mushroom Lab Techniques
These uninoculated bags are for basically growers that maybe don't have the time or the the equipment to make, uh, copious amounts of grain spawn. So basically, they just asked me to prepare it for them, and they could just come pick it up, take it home, and inoculate it in their own conditions with a species of their choice, you know, and that's basically it. Um, so yeah, we just provide a service to the people that ask us for it, and it all works out. So right now, I'm just shaking up there, redistributing the grains to make sure that all the moisture is redistributed throughout the grain spawn, and then I'm just kind of just re-folding up all the creases, pushing out all any excess air, and then just sealing it up. So yeah, somebody could take, like, a liquid culture syringe or, you know, put it in front of a flow hood, cut it, cut off the top, and inoculate.
Basically, these were made by measuring out the proper amount of grain and moisture and adding it into this filter patch bag. From there, we load these into a sterilizer, and these are sterilized at a very high temperature for a prolonged period of time. And after the sterilization cycle is complete, they're moved directly into the laboratory to start the cooldown process, which is, uh, takes takes place right in front of the HEPA filtration. After cooling down for about a day, I come back in here, and then I, you know, proceed with inoculations, whether it be liquid cultures, grain to grains, or inoculation street from a petri dish. And then also, like, right now, I'm basically just getting these ready to go out for for another grower, and they can just inoculate their own grain spawn and inoculate their own bulk substrate or whatever they please.
So buying this pre-sterilized grain spawn really comes in handy for some of my clients that, uh, just don't have time to make this stuff at home, because making spawn kind of takes a little bit of planning and infrastructure. You know, you gotta, you know, depending on how you make it, you kind of got to plan around about 24 hours to 24 to 48 hours out when you're going to begin soaking your grain and basically processing it for sterilization. I know there was times when I was, uh, younger, and I soaked a bunch of grain spawn and ended up working a lot of hours the next day and couldn't get to it in time. And you know, you come back to it, and you get a little bit of fermentation going on, and just it's not optimum for your mushroom mycelium. So this method that I use now is, uh, really doesn't take any planning.
I can just wake up and say I want to make a make some spawn today and have it done by the end of the day. Right now, we're using a soft red winter wheat or wheat berries, and you can use a variety of grains. A lot of people have their own preferences, and my preference is the whole wheat berries, sorghum, or white proso millet, really. But you hear people using oats, corn, popcorn, stuff like that, so it'll all get you to the same, uh, get you to the same destination. But yeah, personally, I think that the soft red winter wheat, the sir gum, and the millet are my three favorites, and also rye when it's available.
Since these are sterilized, it's still important to maintain, like, a sterile technique, especially for me right now, since I'm opening them up. I want to make sure I'm doing this in front of my in front of my flow hood. Make sure that there's just complete sterile air. And when you take this home or if you're going to be inoculating this outside of the lab, you still need to take precautions as to make sure that your inoculation is clean and that you're following proper sterile technique leading up to your inoculation. So if I were to inoculate one of these sterilized grain bags outside.
Of my lab, I'd probably just use a liquid culture syringe and a little bit of micropore tape, and I would flame sterilize the syringe until it's red hot, and I would just stick it into the bag, inject the whole syringe in there, and then immediately cover with a piece of micropore tape. And you can massage the grains to distribute the liquid culture, and at that point you just let it colonize. Usually that takes about 10 days, 10 to 14 days. Then after full colonization, you can proceed by inoculating a bulk substrate of your choice or one that suits the mushroom that you're cultivating. So now we're going to be working with our liquid cultures at this point, and we'll inoculate some grain spawn with liquid culture, just to go over that process and show how I do it.
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So first, we brought our liquid cultures in here and we just put them on our magnetic stirrer, and we basically turn it on to get the mushroom mycelium nice and agitated, broken up throughout the liquid, which will make it easier for us to kind of pour our mycelium into our grain, and also give us more inoculation points with the. So one of the ways that we could do it is we can kind of take a liquid culture syringe, just kind of spray it down with some isopropyl, also spray down the tip right there, and we'll take the syringe and kind of just give it a nice agitating. That way we can kind of break up any mycelium that is in our syringe, and honestly, you don't really have to use the needle when you're inoculating into the bag. Sometimes I usually just take this off and just squirt it in there, but just to kind of show you that's ready to go, and then the s, the needle already comes pretty sterile, so we really don't need to flame sterilize that at this point.
I'm just going to get the whole 10 cc's into our green bag, give it a nice seal, wait about 10 seconds for that seal to to really get, uh, get on there. I'll just check it to make sure that's sealed. Now we can kind of just shake it, mix the liquid culture throughout the grain, and hoping that it evenly coats all these grains with a nice healthy culture, and we can get a really fast colonization that way. We'll do it without the needle attached. So the syringe really comes in handy when you're inoculating through like a a jar lid or a gasket, self-sealing injection port.
Next, we'll take the jar of liquid culture, and we can see that's really colonized rather well. We have a quite a bit of mycelium floating around in there, and I'm just going to pour the liquid culture into the jars, or into the, into the grain spawn bags. That's my personal preference on inoculating with liquid culture. That way I don't have to use any syringes, there's no, uh, you know, waste. There's quite a bit of mycelium in there, so that's a very aggressive Filipino, so that's our agricya badgerito, and that's that.
I just pour into my bags, makes a little bit, uh, I just like it better for my personal use. I find that when you're pouring or when you're using liquid culture, the my slime takes off pretty quick. Green to grain can be quicker, but they both get the job done. You can get a little bit more mycelium, uh, mushroom mileage out of your liquid cultures, just because you can kind of take a little bit and make it go a long way, but those are very great ways to expand your your mycelium. And then when I remove my lid, you kind of just want to make it to where you just pull back.
Oop, that's my gasket. And with the liquid culture, you kind of want to put about two milli milliliters or two cc's per pound, um, so you can just measure that out with the syringes, of course, or I just eyeball it really. All right, that. Does it for our Piopenia inoculation. So yeah, we're just mixing up that liquid culture right there, and I'm actually going to suck it up into a few syringes to preserve it.
And we can kind of see that mycelium in there, just all broken up and fragmented. I put a layer of parafilm around the around the jar lid just to keep out any air or contaminants. There's also a gasket seal right underneath the lid that helps keep a nice tight seal throughout colonization. Yeah, the liquid culture basically is a light, uh, malt dextrose, so it's basically just a little bit of nutrition to basically be able to hold with, uh, sustain mycelium growth and development. But you can use a lot of different recipes for liquid culture.
Um, you know, light malt dextrose, or you know, honey is a good one, like a tablespoon of honey for 500 milliliters of water. And in this case, we just do two teaspoons of dextrose or light malt dextrose per 500 milliliters of water. So that basically creates a nice nutrient, uh, liquid media for for you to inoculate with an agar wedge or even another drop of a liquid culture from another syringe. You can expand out, uh, your liquid culture. Let's say you got a syringe with a liquid culture in it, uh, you could make up some jars of liquid and inoculate them with just like one drop of your own liquid culture solution and just create thousands of milliliters of your own liquid culture.
So fast way to expand out your mycelium. I do this every week, basically once a week I do it. Usually at the usually at the beginning of the week, we start spawn production. So we start making everything, and then we sterilize it, and then as it cools down towards the middle to end of the week, we start, or I start, inoculating here in the laboratory. So every week this is done to maintain us a nice spawn library and basically just a library in general of all of our cultures and genetics and to just keep up with our our needs as far as production goes.
So yeah, at the beginning of the week, we do our our spawn production, and then we also do basically production for our mushroom growing blocks. So yeah, it's always something going on. We're always moving, always busy, because if you don't, uh, you don't stay consistent, you basically find, you know, you'll pay for it later on when you don't have any mushrooms. So I just wait about 10 seconds, make sure I get a good seal. If I don't wait 10 seconds, usually the bag won't be sealed enough to take off and get like a hole in it.
So yeah, we're going to be taking some of this liquid culture out of this jar and bringing it up into a syringe for easy storage and really easy inoculation. If I were to use it to inoculate jars of spawn or whatever, I want to drop a drop on a petri dish and an agar plate to grow out the mycelium further. This is a blue oyster right here, and this was inoculated about, let's see, actually inoculated about seven days ago. So I see a good amount of mycelium growing throughout the culture, and at this point, we're just ready to bring it up into some few. For this point, I go ahead and heat my syringe up just a little bit, so I'll just put it in the back ties after zapper.
We'll just suck it right up into our, and then as I just unscrew the needle , and then I just cap it. And then that way, I could just do multiple syringes off of just that one one needle. So in between syringes, I just like to keep it stirring, keep that mycelium running through the liquid and nice and mixed. So when I do suck up syringes, I'm getting a nice even amount of mushroom mycelium tissue and water or liquid media. All right, and at this point, we can basically store our liquid.
Cultures for later on, and that's a self-healing injection port. The hole basically seals up, and you're good to go for next time. So that's it for really making liquid culture. I mean, very simple, very easy, and uh, just a great way to really get the most out of your mycelium, get the most mileage out of it that way.