Lab Capabilities
- We can produce up to 2400 5-pound bags of spawn or sawdust blocks per week.
- We can clone and purify mycelium from almost any fresh mushroom.
- We can propagate pure mycelium to a nearly infinite extent.
The lab is a large, multi-room building, that is designed and built around a 16 foot long, 4 ½ foot diameter, double-door retort. (A retort is basically a massive pressure cooker, designed for relatively low pressures. I run mine at a maximum of 15 psi, which gives me an effective sterilization temperature of 250 degrees F.) A large gas-powered steam generator heats and pressurized the retort.
The retort is loaded at one end from the 20’ x 36’ substrate preparation room, which also houses a mixer. Specialized heat-resistant plastic bags, fitted with a filter patch to allow for air exchange, are filled with 5 to 6 lbs. of grain or substrate, which are loaded onto aluminum racks that are wheeled into the retort. The retort has a capacity of 480 bags.
The bags are sterilized and allowed to cool in the retort before they are unloaded from the other end of the retort, which opens into the 28’ x 13’ production lab. The production lab is a highly regulated environment that houses a 16’ long x 2’ high laminar flow bench, which is basically a wall of HEPA filters with high-capacity fans fitted behind them. The bags are placed on a table in front of the filters where they opened, inoculated, and sealed while in the highly purified air stream.
The bags are labeled and placed on wire racks set on casters. Each rack holds 80 bags, so 1 batch of 480 bags fills 6 racks. These racks are then wheeled into a 11' x 14' incubation room. There are 3 such rooms, each with its own climate control. Each room can comfortably hold 12 racks, or 960 bags. The production lab can also hold 12 racks. So my incubation capacity is 3840 bags at a time. Since incubation time is generally 10-14 days, I could theoretically produce and incubate 1920 bags per week. If I did 5 loads per week and I crowded the space a bit, I could bump that up to 2400 per week.
In addition to all these rooms, the lab houses a 11’ x 14’ culture lab, which also has its own climate control system. This lab is equipped with a small electric autoclave and a 4’ x 2’ laminar flow bench, which sits on a 4’ x 8’ stainless steel table top. This is where mycelia propagation begins, in Petri dishes filled with a barley malt agar medium.
