30 g Dried Caps

Nine caps, give or take

30 g is the smallest pouch we fill. The count is never the same twice, because a dried cap can weigh 1 g or it can weigh 30 g, and one broad crown weighs as much as ten small buttons. We fill to the gram and let the number of caps fall where it falls.

That range makes this the odd size on the list. A single crown at the top of it weighs 30 g on its own, the whole of this order in one cap, so the smallest amount we sell and the largest cap we pick come to the same weight. Crowns that broad are rare, so what arrives is the ordinary mixture instead.

This is the size people choose for a first specimen or a single display jar, before committing to a pouch that has to be stored properly.

What a gram costs at 30 g

C$57 over 30 grams is C$ 1.90 / g, the dearest gram on this product. The small pouch carries the same picking and the same 36-hour dry as the large one, which is what you are paying the difference for. 50 g is C$86 and brings the gram to C$ 1.72 / g, about 9% less.

One piece of arithmetic goes against us here, and it is easy to miss. Three of these pouches is C$171; the same 90 grams as a single pouch on the main page is C$136. The small pouch is the right way to hold one specimen and the wrong way to hold 90 grams.

Postage on a C$57 order

C$57 sits C$93 under the C$150 mark where the tracked parcel stops costing anything, so postage here is the flat C$21, 2–8 business days, or C$32 by Xpresspost at 1–3 business days. The rate is not about the weight: the flat-rate box takes 5 kg, and 30 g barely registers in it.

One jar, and no second one

The vacuum pouch is the storage until it is cut open. After that the whole 30 g goes into one jar and one is all it asks for, which is the practical advantage this size has over the large ones: there is nothing to divide and no bulk to keep sealed while you handle the rest. Keep the jar dark and off a warm shelf, because light and heat take the red out of a cap far faster than years do, and skip the fridge, where cold glass collects condensation every time it opens. Our notes on storage cover the rest.

Where these nine caps came from

Picked by hand at dawn in the wild forests of British Columbia, one cap at a time. Amanita muscaria will not grow on a farm: it feeds through the roots of living forest trees and dies away from them, so every cap sold anywhere is a wild one. Ours are single origin, one forest and one autumn.

If you have never stood over a red cap in moss, our field identification guide shows what to look at.

^* 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.