Vandweller Amanita Preparation Quirks

[didgerishroom]

Hello there, I found the amazing Amanita Dreamer Youtube channel yesterday when I was out thru-hiking a panhandle section of the Florida Trail and came across what I have identified as amanita persicina. After watching a plethora of the videos, I am left with some questions.

As a vandweller, I do not own nor have easy access to an oven, so I am drying them the same way I have dried psilocybin-containing mushrooms: by filling the bottom of an airtight container with these granules called "Damp Rid", and then placing the chopped up mushrooms on a makeshift rack in the top of the container which keeps them up and off the Damp Rid. Since there is no heat involved, I understand that I will not get the approximately 30% change of ibotenic acid to muscimol. After they are dried, however, I do plan on boiling them as recommended with my little camping stove. So I am wondering if that heat-exposure will be enough to convert the ibotenic acid sufficiently to avoid avoidable unpleasant side-effects? (I do plan on microdosing). Also, in my case, without an oven, would it be better to combine the boiling method with the lemon tek since I would drink it immediately after processing?

Also, I--like our ancient amanita-consuming ancestors--do not own a fridge or freezer, so boiling 15 grams and then storing 3/4 in the freezer and 1/4 in the fridge is also a no-go. I only want to boil what I am going to consume immediately after boiling. But after watching several videos, I am still unclear how many dried grams equates to a microdose. Would it be simply about 15 divided by 4 so about 3.75 gramsish? Can I just boil that much instead of a full 15 grams? Is there some reason I would need to boil 15 grams at a time and thereby have to deal with the problem of not having a way to store what I do not consume right there on the spot? Sorry if this seems obvious to some, but I am finding it excruciatingly difficult to get to the bottom of this by watching the videos.

For that matter, it would be better if I can avoid the cost of buying a gram scale (another thing which I don't think our ancestors owned) and so I am looking to know approximately what 3-4 grams (if that is indeed an appropriate starting range for a microdose ) looks like in terms of teaspoons.

Thanks for any advice! And yes, I am well aware of all the safety warnings and identification rules. I will send pics if asked, but from all I have learned, these have to be persicina--not yellow enough to be the one nor red enough to be the other, but rather peachy.

[Donn]

You're going to learn by experience, and it will be perfectly OK - in small quantities there's no harm and usually not even discomfort.

The point of boiling up a large batch is to average out the potency of the material - one mushroom might be stronger than another, so you get a more reliable average potency out of the whole batch. Not necessarily a big deal.

That variation applies, indeed even more so, to your mushrooms vs. mine, so if I gave you some exact weight figure, you'd be right to disregard that. So it isn't any problem after all, that you can't weigh them.

Likewise, your tolerance for ibotenic acid likely isn't the same as others'. So ... give it a roll if you want, and you'll see.

[didgerishroom]

Thanks for the response. I see, so it's about averaging out various potencies. That makes sense. In fact, some of the amanita I collected were more mature than others, so I probably have very different potencies. I would like to be able to just make a large batch and store it in a tincture. Can someone point me to instructions on how to make an alcohol tincture (while converting a healthy amount of the ibotenic acid)?

[Donn]

By the way, I think I have a picture around here somewhere of a patch of several Amanitas, where some are very red and another is orange. The last patch I got into was distinctly more orange than usual - growing in conjunction with what I suppose is "river birch", Betula nigra, which is not as common around here, as a large tree, as the paper birch. I doubt the color in this case had any major taxonomic significance.,

[amanitadreamer]

Hello there, I found the amazing Amanita Dreamer Youtube channel yesterday when I was out thru-hiking a panhandle section of the Florida Trail and came across what I have identified as amanita persicina. After watching a plethora of the videos, I am left with some questions.

As a vandweller, I do not own nor have easy access to an oven, so I am drying them the same way I have dried psilocybin-containing mushrooms: by filling the bottom of an airtight container with these granules called "Damp Rid", and then placing the chopped up mushrooms on a makeshift rack in the top of the container which keeps them up and off the Damp Rid. Since there is no heat involved, I understand that I will not get the approximately 30% change of ibotenic acid to muscimol. After they are dried, however, I do plan on boiling them as recommended with my little camping stove. So I am wondering if that heat-exposure will be enough to convert the ibotenic acid sufficiently to avoid avoidable unpleasant side-effects? (I do plan on microdosing). Also, in my case, without an oven, would it be better to combine the boiling method with the lemon tek since I would drink it immediately after processing?

Also, I--like our ancient amanita-consuming ancestors--do not own a fridge or freezer, so boiling 15 grams and then storing 3/4 in the freezer and 1/4 in the fridge is also a no-go. I only want to boil what I am going to consume immediately after boiling. But after watching several videos, I am still unclear how many dried grams equates to a microdose. Would it be simply about 15 divided by 4 so about 3.75 gramsish? Can I just boil that much instead of a full 15 grams? Is there some reason I would need to boil 15 grams at a time and thereby have to deal with the problem of not having a way to store what I do not consume right there on the spot? Sorry if this seems obvious to some, but I am finding it excruciatingly difficult to get to the bottom of this by watching the videos.

For that matter, it would be better if I can avoid the cost of buying a gram scale (another thing which I don't think our ancestors owned) and so I am looking to know approximately what 3-4 grams (if that is indeed an appropriate starting range for a microdose ) looks like in terms of teaspoons.

Thanks for any advice! And yes, I am well aware of all the safety warnings and identification rules. I will send pics if asked, but from all I have learned, these have to be persicina--not yellow enough to be the one nor red enough to be the other, but rather peachy.

My alcohol based tinctures all failed so I'm so far, not much help. Mushrooms seem to go bad easier than the plants. Trying to measure microdose by grams is a hard game with amanita. I made a video on it. And the microdose amount should be around at least 40 in a batch made with 15g so your microdose is starting pretty high. BUT it all depends on so many factors. As far as the ancestors, they didn't live alone so batches were easily consumed and probably larger than these. I have worked to try to create a solar oven that would dry them but in the fall it just keeps failing. My tinctures fail and I know that ibo and muscimol are water based so you'd still need to boil them to pull that before boiling it down to put it in a high grain alcohol for storage. This seems to be the rule for oral ingestion. So I will say I am about to start on a tincture that is completely oil based and made for dermal transmission, dosing for pain. It is STRONG and highly concentrated. If it fails I will be losing quite a bit of amanita. I'll be making a video on it. For some reason there is something in amanita that oil pulls out and can cross through the skin into the local area but doesn't seem to jump into the blood stream and get into the body or it does and isn't felt. This is highly interesting as the science says nothing active in amanita is fat based.
I hear all you van dwellers, vagabonds and gypsies and I am and have been working hard on solutions for you but they just keep failing. I'm sorry. Please tag me when you find things that work.