Week 3 Mushrooms

Erik Drews

SOS ComAlt: Week 3

Mushrooms

The second mushroom substrate is composed of the spent grains from a Full wheat ale.

I chose to use a full wheat ale because I have read that both Shiitake and Oyster mycelium can be grown quite successfully on straw. (the stem of the wheat plant.)

Making a beer entirely out of wheat is rather uncommon as even hefeweizens or other wheat beers are usually 40-60% barley. Most of what I found regarding full wheat beers were brewers trying to make beer that could be consumed by someone with a barley allergy. One problem that people run into with a full wheat beer is a stuck sparge due to the lack of hulls in malted wheat. I have heard that home brewers in Germany sometimes add rinsed straw to the mash tun to avoid a stuck sparge. I decided to try this so that I could also include straw in my substrate.

The Spent grain/straw was divided into 6-quart jars, four of which were supplemented with 1 tsp. of alfalfa meal for nitrogen and a ½ tsp. of gypsum for calcium.
Besides the supplemented nutrients in the four jars, each jar should contain roughly:
.66 lb. Malted White Wheat

.04 lb. Oak Smoked Wheat

.12 lb. Torrified Wheat

.25 lb. Red Wheat

1 small handful of straw

Each of these jar were pasteurized in a pressure cooker for 45 minutes at 15 psi and three were inoculated with oyster mycelium and three with shiitake mycelium. These Jars were inoculated on january 26th 2017.