WHO GATHERS YOUR SPECIMEN
Ten years of red caps,
two pairs of hands.
We did this in Europe long before we did it in Canada. Same species, same patience, a new forest.
ShroomsBloom is not a warehouse. It is two people who have spent a decade walking into forests before sunrise for one mushroom, Amanita muscaria, the fly agaric, the мухомор of Eastern Europe, and learning, season after season, how to dry and rest it properly.
Across those years in Europe we served more than 10,000 customers and collected close to 2,000 written reviews. In Europe this mushroom is not exotic: it is a familiar part of forest culture, gathered and traded openly, with entire communities built around identifying and preserving it well. We brought that experience with us to British Columbia.
What the European years taught us
Almost everything that matters happens in the first forty-eight hours. Pick at dawn, when the caps are firm and cold. Never wash them - water dulls the red and invites rot. Part the caps from the stems before drying so the heat reaches evenly. Dry low and slow at 40 °C, then finish with a brief rise to 90 °C so residual ibotenic acid converts to muscimol. Then leave them alone: three months of rest in a sealed pouch, in the dark, is what separates a proper specimen from a fast one.
Ten years of doing that, and of answering thousands of customer letters about it, is why our caps stay brick-red instead of turning brown, and why our powder mills light cream-ochre instead of the dark, scorched grind you often see elsewhere.
About what nature does, and what we are allowed to say
People write to us about the forest, about slowing down, about why a red cap under a birch has held human attention for a thousand years. We understand the pull. Nature has been the oldest company people keep, and this particular mushroom has walked beside northern cultures for as long as those cultures have had stories.
People ask what it does. There is a great deal written about this mushroom, and we are not the ones who get to summarise it for you.
Health Canada does not permit a business selling a botanical specimen to make health, wellness or therapeutic claims. So we make none, in either direction. And the literature would not let us make a simple claim even if we were allowed: the same reviews that discuss possible applications also record poisonings, hospital admissions and a firm warning against self-medication. Anyone who hands you a tidy answer about this mushroom is selling you something. Usually the mushroom.
What is not in dispute is the history. Amanita muscaria has been treated as an out-of-the-ordinary mushroom for thousands of years, set apart from every other mushroom by the reindeer herders of Siberia, by Sámi, Norse and Slavic tradition, and written about continuously ever since. That record is public. Read it yourself: the ethnography, then the chemistry, then the arguments, then the rebuttals, and read the criticism beside every claim.
Our part stops at the forest floor: gather it properly, dry it properly, cure it properly, and tell you exactly what we did.
Why British Columbia
Amanita muscaria is mycorrhizal - it lives in partnership with the roots of living trees, which is why it cannot be farmed. Every cap in the world is wild by definition. The birch, pine and spruce forests of British Columbia give us the same partnership our European forests did, on a coast where the autumn flush is short, cold and clean.
We pick one cap and leave the colony standing. The mycelium underground can live for years; taking a single fruiting body harms it no more than picking an apple harms the tree. That rule has not changed in ten years, on either continent.
Nearly 2,000 reviews, kept
We did not leave them behind. Every review written by our European customers over the years was exported when the old shop closed, and we are publishing them here, unedited - including the long ones.
Read the reviews Ten years · 10,000+ customers · ~2,000 written reviews
How to reach us
A person answers, usually within a day: info@shroomsbloom.ca. Orders paid before 6 pm Vancouver time go out the same day, tracked with Canada Post - a flat-rate tracked parcel or Xpresspost, your choice at checkout.
Botanical specimen · not for consumption · 19+. Fresh Amanita muscaria (fly agaric) is toxic - a raw cap is loaded with ibotenic acid, which careful drying and curing convert largely into muscimol.