SPECIMEN № 001 · 200 GRAMS
200 g Dried Caps
200 grams of wild Amanita muscaria (fly agaric), somewhere near 62 whole dried caps, picked one at a time in British Columbia.
Prefer a different amount? Any weight from 30 to 500 g can be ordered on the main dried caps page - drag the scale or type the exact grams.
Past the point of counting
Two hundred grams is roughly 62 caps, and this is where counting them stops being useful. The pouch is measured by weight and looks it: crowns, mid-sized caps and buttons together, as they came off the drying trays.
What two hundred grams takes up
Two hundred grams of dried caps is not two hundred grams of anything else in the cupboard. A cap that has spent thirty-six hours in the dryer is mostly air, so the shelf this wants is closer to a loaf of bread than to a bag of coffee of the same weight. The vacuum holds it down to a brick for the journey. Cut the seal and the 62 caps come back up to their own size, and there is no getting them into the space they travelled in.
That is the argument for taking out only what you are looking at. At 200 g the pouch gets opened more than once, and every opening is the whole 200 g meeting the room rather than the handful in your hand. An airtight jar for the part being handled, and the rest closed up and dark, keeps those two apart.
The first size that ships for nothing
C$261 clears the C$150 threshold, so the tracked Canada Post parcel costs nothing at all. Xpresspost is charged as the difference rather than the full fare: C$11 instead of C$32, which is as cheap as the fast service gets here.
C$ 1.30 / g at this weight
That is about 12% under the 100 g pouch. 500 g takes another 14% off and reaches C$ 1.12 / g, which is the floor for this product.
Two hundred grams of one autumn
Amanita muscaria is mycorrhizal, which is the reason none of this can be farmed: the fungus lives on the roots of forest trees and will not fruit away from them. Every cap in this pouch was picked one by one and carried out in a woven basket. The specimen library sets out the species in full, from its anatomy to the forests it keeps to.
What arrives is not graded material either. It is mixed natural sizes, as found, and the identification guide shows what those look like standing in the forest. Once here, the sealed pouch does the storage work for you.
* No cap comes out of a forest perfectly clean, and a brush only gets so far. Expect the odd spruce needle, a fragment of dry leaf or a little soil in the pouch. We do not wash them: washing would put back the water the dryer spent 36 hours taking out.
Anything sold for people to eat falls under Canada's food and natural health product rules, which is why this is sold as a botanical specimen instead.
Questions about 200 g
How many caps is 200 g?
Roughly 62, at mixed sizes from 1 to 30 g each. The weight is the measure, not the count.
Does 200 g ship free?
Yes. C$261 is past the C$150 threshold, so the tracked parcel costs nothing and Xpresspost drops to the C$11 difference.
What does 200 g cost per gram?
C$ 1.30 / g, about 12% under the 100 g pouch and about 14% above the 500 g one.
How is 200 g packed?
Vacuum-sealed the week it left the dryer, in a pouch or a rigid box depending on what holds the weight better, inside a plain courier envelope.
How should 200 g be stored?
Sealed and dark. Keep the seal shut on whatever you are not handling: a specimen that never meets air keeps its colour longest.