Are Your Amanitas Genuine?

We take great pride in procuring Amanita specimens from a variety of places and in a variety of grades to provide our customers with the widest range of choices available, and to help let our customers become aware that there are multiple grades of Amanitas available. What one site might be selling as “Amanita muscaria caps” might be a “B” or “C” grade specimen, but may not alert their customer to the differences.

In terms of drying our Amanita muscaria specimens, we only buy from well-known, trustworthy suppliers who have been in the Amanita business for at least several years. Our Amanitas are dried using a variety of methods, depending on where they come from, but we absolutely insist on uniformity of drying temperatures for all of our suppliers. This means that if the Amanitas are dried in a stone oven, or on drying racks, or in the sun, they must all maintain a temperature of 140 degrees to 180 degrees Fahrenheit. The specimens are all dried without stems, and they are dried with the caps upside down so that any sweat that is produced by the drying process finds its way back into the cap itself, rather than spilling out.

Our specimens are graded by richness of color rather than wholeness of the cap. We feel this is a far more accurate assessment of the quality of the specimen. Only the caps with the richest colors AND are mostly whole specimens make it into our “A+” grade. Caps that are very nicely preserved are put into our “A” category. Caps that are still nice specimens, but have some discoloration are placed into our “B” category. Any leftover caps that didn’t fit into “A+” or “A” or “B” get put into our “Mix” and our “C” grade.

For researchers interested in the nature of iboteic acid and muscimol in Amanita muscaria, it has been reported that Amanitas which are left in storage for a period of time may see a further breakdown of iboteic acid into muscimol. Because the specimens we offer are so carefully dried, they will keep for a period of 2 years or more without visible degradation in the color of the Amanita.

As far as our Amanita extracts are concerned, we make these ourselves, and do only a cool extraction of the Amanita to preserve the original structure and energy of the plant as possible. We want all of our incense resins to be as close to the original plant as possible.

Hopefully this will help answer your questions. If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to ask, as long as the question abides by our Terms & Conditions on the website.