Catskill Fungi and Our Magical World of Mushrooms 🍄

Transcription by Jerome Kazlauskas

[00:00:00] John Michelotti: You know, with mushrooms being seasonal, you can find some in the spring, some in the summer, some in the fall. You could walk the same trail again and again and find different things every time, and the mushroom is the fruiting body of a fungi, similar to an apple on an apple tree, where the function of the apples to make seeds so that more trees propagate. The function of the mushroom is to make spores, and spores are the seeds of fungi.

[00:00:26] Brett Barry: John Michelotti is the founder of Catskill Fungi, and he's a walking and enthusiastic encyclopedia on the topic with a goal of educating and inspiring people to work with fungi to improve their health, communities, and the environment. In 2019, the Catskill Center named him one of the 50 stewards of the Catskills. We joined him outside Catskill Fungi's Commercial Kitchen on Route 28 in Pine Hill. The building's hard to miss. It's the one with the vibrant mushroom mural. This is Brett Barry, and welcome to Kaatscast: The Catskills Podcast.

[00:01:04] John Michelotti: Yeah, welcome to the commercial kitchen. Welcome to the education space for Catskill fungi. Yeah, we've been in this space for a few years, and we've been running workshops down the road at our family farm. It's a fifth-generation family farm, and that's kind of where I got my start in the Catskills. From there, we've kind of expanded and kind of built this commercial kitchen just in the last five years, and then just last year we painted the mushroom mural on the front.

[00:01:37] Brett Barry: Where did your interest come from, and how did you learn about mushrooms?

[00:01:41] John Michelotti: Yeah, so I wasn't raised with mushrooms. I was raised, you know, don't touch it. It's gonna kill you. My sister tried to feed me some mushrooms behind my grandfather's barn at some point, but it was a good thing I was a picky eater because there's no way I was gonna eat these slimy things on the back of it, but she tries to take credit for my interest, but really it came later in life. I was an outdoor guide and a boat captain, and I was really volunteering a lot in nature centers, and I remember at one point being on the ground and seeing this little red hygrocybe. I didn't know what it was. It's this red waxy cap. I mean, bright red cap, bright red stem, and the gills underneath were bright yellow. I mean, I was blown away, and I switched around my schedule to join every mushroom walk I could potentially go on, and that was with the Connecticut-Westchester Mycological Association, and I spent all my time learning about that and peeling through books and really learning as much as I possibly could about them once I found them and realized the profound impact they have on the environment and the ecology of a given area and the fact that they are really essential to plants, habitating where they're growing and surviving where they grow. I was hooked, so I did an extended internship in Ecuador learning mycoremediation and cultivation and medicinal extract making, and that was mycoremediation [is how fungi can be utilized to bioremediate an area or help with taking pollutants out of soil or water and things like that]. So in that, I just became very excited and involved with a background in outdoor education and was so happy to share the news about these fungi, and given the opportunity, I was happy to kind of talk to really anybody about it that was willing to listen, and I remember I was on a walk with the Catskill Forest Association that Marguerite Uhlmann-Bower was leading, and at one point, you know, there were mushrooms everywhere, and she got to know me and was like, oh, I don't know what that is, but talk to him. He seems to know the mushrooms, and Ryan Trapani asked me if I would wanna lead a mushroom walk, and I was so excited that, you know, this was a potential around here, and at the same time, I was making mushroom extracts from reishi and chaga and lion's mane just for myself and friends and family, and I remember I was at the High Falls Food Co-op, and I saw mushroom extracts coming from the other side of the country, and I asked them if they wanted a local source of mushroom extracts, and they got pretty excited about it, so that was really the start of Catskill Fungi, my company, so that was when I kind of made the leap to follow my main mentor, Gary Lincoff's advice, and quit my job and devote my life to mushrooms.

[00:04:37] Brett Barry: That's working out well.

[00:04:38] John Michelotti: So far, so good. I'm happier every day.

[00:04:46] Brett Barry: John brought us behind the building to the edge of Birch Creek, where a stack of logs are inoculated with shiitake spawn. In many ways, discussing fungi was like chatting about alien life, and the more John divulged about this mysterious life form, in my own mind at least, that metaphor held true.

[00:05:09] John Michelotti: So we're on our way to see if there's any shiitakes pruning on our mushroom logs. We host a variety of different workshops here at the education space, some of which are focused around outdoor cultivation, so not only do we bring people in the woods and teach them what's growing, and we're gonna go on a mushroom walk and try to see what we can find, but we also do a lot of cultivation here, so we will teach people how to cultivate mushrooms indoors, outdoors, and things like that, so the logs we're checking today are more of an outdoor log inoculation where after a tree falls, you know, you can cut it up and put the spawn inside the log, and it'll grow through and fruit shiitake mushrooms and lion's mane mushrooms and things like that. We're here to talk about mushrooms. We're here to talk about fungi. Like, what are these organisms? What are these things? And we can start with the mushroom itself, and the mushroom is the fruiting body of a fungi. It's the sporocarp, so basically similar to an apple on an apple tree, where the function of the apples to make seeds so that more trees propagate. The function of the mushroom is to make spores. Spores are the seeds of fungi, and they're microscopic. They're in the air all around us, and we're breathing in spores our whole lives, and they circle the globe, and they're incredibly resilient, and these spores, I mean, they've taken core samples from Antarctica from millions of years ago and gotten these spores to germinate and fruit mushrooms, so they're kind of these DNA packets in a hard case that are just ready and waiting for the right conditions to be able to germinate and run with mycelium. Now, mycelium is like learning the word "tree," right? So from the spores, they germinate, they replicate, they split their nuclei, and they kind of run off like strands, and these strands are extending from each spore to find another spore of the same species with similar compatible DNA, and when they find each other and they lock up and they start an interconnected network called "mycelium." Mycelium is the tree. It's the living body of fungi that's alive 365 days a year, but we don't really see it because, once again, it's microscopic, but it's in all the deadwood around us. It's under our feet right now in the soil, and it's interlacing in between the tree roots and helping to break down detritus within the soil and put it into plant-soluble forms, and then it translocates it through its mycelial body, and so the mycelium is more like a net, unlike tree roots that continuously branch and branch and branch. This interconnects back in on itself, and it forms more of a network underground, and it can keep growing and growing as long as there's a food source there. In fact, one of the largest fungi we know of is an armillaria, or a honey mushroom fungi mycelial mat, that's in the Pacific Northwest, and it's over 2,400 acres in size and thought to be over 2,000 years old, and it's growing under the soil, grows up between the bark and the cambium of these trees, kind of strangles out the tree as a parasite, and then continues to digest that tree to fruit mushrooms and continuously spread out.

[00:08:43] Brett Barry: If we were to say that it had an ecological function, it's to break down matter.

[00:08:48] John Michelotti: Yeah, that's a big one. There's three main ones, right? You have the parasitic relationship, which is really one where, by definition, we can observe a—it's a one-way relationship. One of the organisms in the relationship is getting a benefit, and the other one's not. It's not necessarily harming it, but it's just not getting a benefit. In a lot of cases it can be harmful, but in some cases maybe we just can't observe the benefit that the other organism's getting. If you've ever seen Monotropa uniflora [or ghost pipe] that grows in the summer and the fall, it's a white plant that grows without making its own chlorophyll, and the way it does that is by taking its nutrients from an underground mycelium, but that mycelium sometimes seeks out that relationship, so even though we can't observe anything that the mycelium is getting from the ghost pipe, there still might be a way in which it's beneficial but considered currently to be a parasite, and that kind of brings us to another function of fungi, which is really gaining a lot of press, and a lot of people are talking about it right now, and that's the mycorrhizal relationship, and that is, "myco" is fungi, so the study of fungi is mycology, and "rhizal" is root, so in mycorrhizal we have a symbiotic beneficial relationship between plants and mycelium where the mycelium is overlaying over the root hairs of plants and extending out from there to get nutrients and translocate it into the roots of that plant, and as it wraps around the root, it's also protecting it from other pathogens, and other fungi that could potentially parasitize that root, so it's wrapping around it like a sheath almost, and then extending out, getting nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen and water, even transforming some of that phosphorus into plant-soluble forms and giving that to the root, and in exchange up to a third of the plant's energy through photosynthesis can go towards making these simple sugars that go into the mycelium. It trades it for these [phosphorus, nitrogen, and water] that it's getting from the mycelium, and the roots of the mycelium in these mycorrhizal connections extend almost tenfold or a hundredfold what the root pairs could do themselves, and just one way in which you can picture this is if you kind of focused in on the thinnest, smallest root hair you possibly could and blew it up into a microscope and said, "It was the size of your arm." The mycelium would be as fine as spaghetti, and it would be completely covering and kind of extending beyond that, so it's much more small, fine root tips that can really extend much beyond that, and you can see mycelium in the pores. If you roll over a log, you can see... kind of these white tendrils that are on the underside of the logs or pick up leaves, you can see the mycelium. The way you can see it that way is because the mycelium is binding together over itself to be macroscopic so you can actually see it. So once again, those three functions that we've talked about within the environment—you have these parasitic fungi that also serve an essential function in the forest. You have decomposers, and you have mycorrhizal fungi, so when we go to cultivate mushrooms, the ones that we generally work with are decomposers because we know that the mycelium grows with certain types of wood, and so if we can feed it that certain type of wood, it can break that down and to complete the lifecycle of fungi. That mycelium pulls its energy together and fruits mushrooms.

[00:12:46] Brett Barry: And again, if you see a mushroom, it's a fungi. If you see a fungi, it might not have a mushroom corollary?

[00:12:52] John Michelotti: That's exactly right. Yeah, so not all fungi are the mushrooms, but every mushroom is a fungi, and there are a lot of [out of that kingdom fungi]. We like to say "kingdom" because everything's kin around here and it's a little bit more gender neutral, but the fungi are the second largest kingdom in life, and they only became their own kingdom in 1969. Before that they were considered lesser plants, but [as animals] were actually much more closely related to fungi than we are to plants because we both breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide [fungi do this on a cellular level], we both digest food in similar and opposite ways, and this is actually where we branched off evolutionarily, is that animals created sacks or stomachs that, you know, we take in food, it goes into that sack, enzymes are released, which break down those nutrients, and we absorb the nutrients through that. Will the fungi continue to digest food externally? So if you can imagine that interconnected mat that's underground, that's in deadwood at the end of those tips, the root tips, it's excreting enzymes into its environment, which are breaking down lignin, cellulose, hemicellulose, the building blocks of wood, and then it's absorbing the food that it can from that and continuously extending from there, so as long as it has a food source, it can continuously grow and grow and grow, and it almost has nearly, like, electric-like impulses to kind of find different things, and it senses where food can be. We don't exactly know exactly how that's happening, but once it finds that food, it can excrete enzymes, break down the food, and absorb the nutrients, and then it can translocate that energy to the other parts of itself to extend to continuously find other foods, so it's pretty profound in how that works, and one thing about mycelium and this kind of lens back into the cultivation topic is that the mycelium will continuously grow and grow and grow until it reaches the edges until it reaches, okay, this is the max amount of food we're going to get from this substrate because either it reaches the end of a tree or the bark, or it runs up against another fungi that's in that tree digesting the same thing. Once it realizes its edges, it says, "Okay, now it's time to take this food substance. We're gonna pool our energy together to fruit mushrooms so that we can create spores to travel on the air current or travel with animals and go find new places to inoculate to grow," so that's kind of your basic life cycle. You know, the mushrooms are there to make spores. Spores make mycelium. Mycelium is singular; mycelia is plural, and then from that, mycelia grow mushrooms. In the Catskills [in the Northeast], we have some of the most tree diversity that you would see anywhere else, so with all the different types of trees and woods that we have, you're gonna find some high diversity within fungi as well. The forest changes again and again. You know, you could be walking through the forest, and it could be a young forest of birch and ash and things like that, but then you go a little bit further, and it matures to hemlock, and you might have some oaks or you might have sugar maples, and just the sheer amount of diversity in trees we have dictates just the amount of fungi that are out there. The moisture is a really important part to this area because the fungi need... they need that moisture in order to fruit mushrooms, so that's generally when people go out looking for fungi. It's about a day or two after it rained, and we'll see mushrooms, and that actually brings us back to where we're standing right now, which is our log inoculation pile. So these are logs that we inoculated with shiitake mushrooms, and the way we did that is by drilling holes in freshly cut logs. Now they need to be freshly cut because, remember, the spores are everywhere in the air around us, so if the log has been sitting on the ground for longer than even a month or six weeks, some spores will have landed on it and started to digest it, so we take fresh-cut logs, we drill holes in them, and we put spawn, which is basically mycelium growing on sawdust, into the log, and then over the course of a year or more, that mycelium will grow throughout that log, and then once it's completely inoculated that log, it will fruit shiitake mushrooms. It may take a lot of upfront work to cut the trees and drill the holes and put the spawn in, and then you cover it with wax to seal it, but once that mycelium proliferates inside that log, it will fruit mushrooms for about four years kind of throughout the seasons, and the reason why we're lucky here in the Northeast is because we can just leave our logs outside and let them get rained on, and that's why I put this rain gauge here inside these logs, and so we can kind of check this and see that, yeah, over the course of the last week, it rained about half an inch, so sometimes after a good rain of about an inch, you'll see a good flush of mushrooms. Temperature's a big part of it too because mushrooms are seasonal. You know, I wait for those temperatures to be just right, wait for that rain to come, and you can predict that you'll have some mushrooms, so...

[00:18:40] Brett Barry: And then when you harvest those mushrooms, do they grow back in the same spots or throughout the log?

[00:18:44] John Michelotti: Yeah, that's right, yep, throughout that log, and that log will stay viable as it breaks down over the course of four years, and you'll see, like, the weight of the logs just lightens and lightens and lightens as it goes.

[00:18:58] Brett Barry: What percentage of the mushrooms in the Catskills are edible?

[00:19:03] John Michelotti: Wow, good question! So any mushrooms are edible once. You just may not live to eat them again, but one thing I want to say about the edible toxicology conversation is that there are no mushrooms in the Catskills that are poisonous to touch, so you can safely touch any mushrooms, smell the mushrooms, you know, appreciate them, photograph them—like all of this is safe, but you would have to ingest the mushroom in order to be poisoned, and there's about six different toxins that are out there within the mushrooms. Those that can cause gastric upset and maybe just a little stomachache. Those that can cause vomiting or diarrhea. You have those that will react with alcohol and shut down your liver's ability to process alcohol and really hinder your ADH4, which is in your liver that helps you do that, and it will make you feel like you have the worst hangover in the world, even after just drinking one drink. You have other mushrooms, like the false morels, which, we are, is an indicator mushroom of the true morel that we're probably about to see here around mid-April, but before that, at about a week before, you'll see a false morel, and the false morel, some people say, "It doesn't look anything like a true morel, but the false morel is a little bit more red, and false morels have monomethylhydrazine, which is rocket fumes."

[00:20:40] Brett Barry: Rocket fumes?

[00:20:41] John Michelotti: Well, it's what we utilize to launch rockets into space, or hydrazines, and so these hydrazines within the mushroom can be very toxic, and it's also why you always have to cook your morels. Really, all your mushrooms should be cooked thoroughly, but especially morels. Morels, if not cooked thoroughly, these hydrazines can react. They can cause projectile vomiting, which, as the late Tom Volk says, is not as fun as it sounds, and then, of course, we have mushrooms that are psychedelic, and then you have those that are neurotrophic and then those that are completely deadly. Those that will take out your liver's ability to replicate new cells, and without a liver transplant within 72 hours, you could die, so we have all of these mushrooms in our woods, including the edible ones, so I'll tell you some good news, though. When it comes to edible mushrooms, the easiest 10 mushrooms to learn that proliferate the Catskills and the Northeast are some of the easiest ones to learn and are some of the most delicious and grow in droves, so with each one of those mushrooms, there's no one thing I can tell you that, oh, if the mushroom has this, it's edible or that it's poisonous, but you have to look at each one specifically and say, "Okay, chicken mushroom." Chicken mushroom was the first mushroom that I ate from the wild, and that's a really profound experience to have—really going out there in the forest, seeing something that's obscure that you pick, and you really learn it well enough to know, and I'm gonna cook it and eat it and nourish my body with something that I learned out in the forest, and I'll tell you once you do that, you will forever know that mushroom, and chicken mushroom is bright yellow underneath and bright orange on top, and it grows like a shelf on the side of deadwood. In fact, many of the mushrooms that are edible, the easy edible mushrooms, don't look like the typical-looking mushroom you think of when you think "mushroom with the cap and stem and gills" because there's so many things out there that look like that already. If it's got a cap stem and gills under the cap, that is a moderate identification, moderate to expert level, but your easy edibles to ID are some of the most profound, prolific, and delicious, so the chicken mushroom grows like a shelf on the side of deadwood and occurs from spring all the way through the end of fall and has the taste and texture of chicken. It's quite good, but...

[00:23:26] Brett Barry: I've never had it because I don't trust myself, so I identify anything that even resembles a mushroom.

[00:23:32] John Michelotti: Right, and that brings up a lot of conversation. In fact, one is I always tell people to triple-check their mushrooms. You know, I can be one pair of eyes on it, but it's good to look it up yourself in a book, and you can join mushroom clubs around, and they can help you identify. There are some decent forums online that can help you identify. You can go on a mushroom walk with a professional and learn your mushrooms that way.

[00:23:57] Brett Barry: Can you tell me about that so you do that's part of what you do?

[00:24:00] John Michelotti: Absolutely, yeah, so we lead two-hour mushroom walks or a variety of different mushroom walks publicly and privately, where we take people in the forest, we teach them what's growing, we talk about the interconnections of fungi in the ecosystem, and what it is we're finding, why it's growing there, what it's doing, its name, whether it's poisonous or edible, or whether it's been utilized throughout human history in different ways how it ties into the Catskills, as well as its medicinal properties, things like that, so as we go out in the forest, there's always new things to find, and, you know, with mushrooms being seasonal, you can find some in the spring, some in the summer, some in the fall. You could walk the same trail again and again and find different things every time, so it's really kind of like a fun scavenger hunt when you're out there, and we take baskets and we take hand lenses that are magnifying glasses that really help you look at the features of the mushroom up close and personal, and that is what you need to really identify what they are. These classes we run, yeah, from May all the way through the end of October, whenever the fungi are up and showing themselves, and really hope to focus on inspiring connection with fungi, with each other, with the environment that we're in, you know, with the Catskills. We also host the cultivation workshops. We do three-day-long Friends of Fungi retreats where people can learn to forage, and in the fall we lead one where you're guaranteed to know 10 edible mushrooms by the end of it. We also have one in the spring where we focus on a lot more DIY or GIY [grow-it-yourself] classes where we do indoor cultivation, outdoor cultivation, we make medicinal mushroom extracts... We, of course, go on a mushroom walk and see what we can find. We talk about myco-technologies and the different ways in which fungi can be beneficial to our health, so...

[00:25:57] Brett Barry: When you talk about the diversity of edible mushrooms, which is vast compared to what you find at a grocery store, which is what, like, a white button mushroom? I don't know what the scientific name is, and are those all the same, that come from the same place, or what's the—how does that selection pale in comparison to what we can consume?

[00:26:17] John Michelotti: Oh yeah, that's a great question. So New York State used to be the largest producer of mushrooms in the country. They were grown in caves in the Hudson Valley, in Rosendale and Coxsackie, and now it's Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, that produces your predominant, like, the one mushroom that we know of that is in our grocery stores that has been for years. That's Agaricus bisporus, or the button mushroom, but also the portobello mushroom and the baby bella mushroom. It's the same species, just different growing conditions to kind of form those with different growths. Let's see, about 12 years ago it was something like 60% of them were all cultivated in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, and now it's down to probably about 48% that are grown in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, because there are so many other producers cropping up and learning how to grow mushrooms and producing them, and so shiitakes you're starting to see in grocery stores—these are considered specialty mushrooms. Your shiitakes, your oyster mushrooms... Lion's mane is starting to crop up quite a bit. You might see maybe a few more. You might see chestnuts or pioppinos all growing here, and these are ones you can cultivate at home too. When it comes to the diversity outdoors, there are many, many more. I mean, we're talking, like I said, there's probably 10 to 20 easy edibles that you could learn to identify within the first few years of mushroom foraging, confidently identify, and you're right, you really have to be cautious with it. You don't want to eat a mushroom that you're 99% sure of. You have to be 100% sure because the risk could be fatal in some cases, but when it comes to it, there's so much more diversity out there. I mean, I have friends that have been studying mycology and mushrooms for over 30 years that have eaten close to 400 different varieties of mushrooms out there. When it comes to edibility and poisonous mushrooms, it's really like a bell curve. You know, you have your primo edibles on one side. As the curve goes up, you have a lot of mushrooms that just aren't really that good. You can eat them, but they're just not that palatable. They taste mealy, and, you know, I mean, I guess if you were, like, if you needed to survive in the forest and, you know, you had a frying pan and could build a fire, you could eat them, but, you know, you wouldn't necessarily brag to your friends, you know, or bring them home to, like, a potluck or anything. You may not get invited back, but then you have, like, a lot of the main part of the bell curve that's not edible and not poisonous. You just wouldn't really think to eat it. It's just like a hard piece of wood or something like that, and then on the other side you have those poisonous mushrooms that we talked about before [gastric upset to deadly poisonous], but all of them occur in the forest here, and we're really fortunate for that.

[00:29:14] Brett Barry: Are there psychedelic mushrooms in the Catskills?

[00:29:17] John Michelotti: Yes, there are. There are some that grow in conjunction with mulch. Ovoideocystidiata is the species [psilocybin], and they are kind of more along the Hudson Valley, and honestly, psilocybin mushrooms occur more readily in urban and suburban environments than they do in rural environments in the country, outside in mulch, outside courthouses, and police stations. Don't ask me why, but it's like, it's a known thing that, like, they're there. One of my favorite recent books about this, if you wanna get into the culture of psilocybin and how it's progressed as well as current scientific studies and where this movement is going, is a brand new book that came out this year called Have a Good Trip by Eugenia Bone. She lives in New York City and has foraged up in the Catskills plenty, but she talks about knockers, or basically people that guerrilla inoculate different places with psilocybe and mushrooms growing in mulch, so they'll know where a spot is, they'll know where there's gonna be a dump of wood chips, and they grab handfuls of that mycelium that's growing in that mulch, and then they put it in the new patch and, you know, hope to proliferate them throughout cities, suburbs, you know, in random places.

[00:30:40] Brett Barry: Wow!

[00:30:41] John Michelotti: So yeah.

[00:30:42] Brett Barry: It's a diverse kingdom.

[00:30:43] John Michelotti: It is a diverse kingdom, and yes, some of those do occur in the Catskills. I think, more in the Catskills, we have hallucinogenic mushrooms that aren't your typical psilocybin mushrooms. We have big laughing gyms, which is what they're called, and they have some psilocybin. They also have other chemicals. They're not really known that widely in many circles aside from mycologists, so it's really kind of there's a lot of different variety out there, but to date, I mean, over a hundred different species of mushrooms worldwide have contained psilocybin or more.

[00:31:22] Brett Barry: Is it just by chance that it affects humans in a certain way?

[00:31:24] John Michelotti: Yeah, a really, really amazing chance. I mean, it's when you look at... chemically, like what is going on with psilocybin and our serotonin receptors, it's like a lock and a key. I mean, how it fits so perfectly is really pretty profound. There has been different evolutions of psilocybin in different mushrooms over 20 different times. I mean, so the mushrooms are evolving to make this chemical, but we don't know why.

[00:32:03] Brett Barry: Join us after the break for a tour of the Catskill Fungi Commercial Kitchen, where John and his crew process mushrooms—the good ones into extracts with a curious collection of health-boosting properties.

[00:32:18] Campbell Brown: Kaatscast is supported by The Mountain Eagle, covering Delaware, Greene, and Schoharie counties, including brands for the local region such as The Windham Weekly,Schoharie News, Cobleskill Herald, and Catskills Chronicle. For more information, call (518) 763-6854 or email mountaineaglenews@gmail.com; and by Briars & Brambles Books, the go-to independent book and gift store in the Catskills, located in Windham, New York, right next to the pharmacy, just steps away from the Windham Path, open daily! For more information, visit briarsandbramblesbooks.com or call (518) 750-8599.

[00:33:00] Brett Barry: In the summer of '23, a mural of mushrooms popped up on the side of Catskill Fungi's building like a cluster of mushrooms after a Catskill rain. The mural is a roadside attraction of its own, but inside the building is where mushrooms are processed into a variety of health-boosting extracts.

[00:33:21] John Michelotti: Inside this commercial kitchen, you know, as you walk in, you can kind of see our display. It has the different extracts that we've made from reishi, lion's mane, chaga, maitake, cordyceps, and turkey tail.

[00:33:33] Brett Barry: So can you tell me a little bit about how you go from mushroom to extract in this space?

[00:33:38] John Michelotti: Yeah, you got it. Well, you can see that there's some dehydrated mushrooms in these bins up here and inside. Inside the bins, you have double-bagged and bagged mushrooms, and these mushrooms are lion's mane. Lion's mane—these are cultivated by our friends at Collar City Mushrooms, just a few miles north of us here, and lion's mane mushroom—there's just not enough in the wild, same with the cordyceps. There's not enough lion's mane or cordyceps you can find in the wild to make extracts on a commercial scale. However, when it comes to our chaga, when it comes to our reishi, our maitake or hen-of-the-woods, and turkey tail, they're all wildcrafted in the Catskill Mountains, so these are pieces of chaga that are wildcrafted. Now you can see this big block. I mean, it's a really hard, dense material, so we need to break this up into smaller pieces, and then from breaking it up into smaller pieces, we then put it in a Vitamix to break it up into a powder, and so once it's a powder, the reason why, if you're making extracts or tinctures, you'd want to powder something is because you're increasing the surface area that that liquid can really wrap around that mushroom or plant, and so what we do after we grind that up, we put it in alcohol, and then the alcohol, it will sit for four to six weeks, and you can see this is the chaga sitting in alcohol here, and this is a non-GMO organic cane alcohol that we source locally in New Jersey, and we shake these up regularly and think happy thoughts. We utilize biodynamic practices and the rocking of the extract as they get stirred throughout the course of time, and it sits in those jars and out of direct sunlight, and then from there we will strain that out. We'll take that mushroom, we'll do a cold water soak so it'll sit in a jar with cold water in the fridge for 24 to 48 hours, and then it gets strained out again, and then we do a triple decoction, which is basically on a pot on the stove and reducing it from three times the amount down to a third, so we do that at a low heat of 170 degrees or less because if you go higher, you're going to kind of lose some of those beneficial polysaccharides, and so we reduced that down. It takes close to a full day to reduce it down, and then we strain it out again, so now we have our alcohol liquid, we have our cold water liquid, and now we have our decoction liquid, and then we blend them together at a ratio so that our ending result is 30% alcohol, and that's what we have here in these finished jars, so these are all finished extract of chaga. Back when I was originally making extracts, when I was making it for myself and friends and family, it was very much like pretty loosey-goosey. Oh, I found this in the woods. I'm gonna throw it in a jar, pour some vodka over. Great! Once I decided to go do this commercially, that's when I really started peeling through the scientific studies of what processes, what methods they utilized to yield what results, like what were their quantities, what were their processes of it, and some of them were alcohol extracts, some were hot water extracts, some of them were cooked, and I basically, from looking at what they had there, I took the best practices and combined them, and so that was where I created the triple extract from what was that process, and since then, like, it's been somewhat tweaked, like the first year or two when we were doing farmers' markets, we tweaked it a little bit based on what our customers were saying, but we've pretty much had the same recipe for the past 10 years.

[00:38:07] Brett Barry: So you have six extract here on display?

[00:38:10] John Michelotti: Mm-hmm.

[00:38:11] Brett Barry: Reishi?

[00:38:12] John Michelotti: Yeah.

[00:38:12] Brett Barry: Lion's mane, chaga, maitake, cordyceps, and turkey tail, and under each you list what it promotes in terms of health, so maybe you can just tell us a little bit about that.

[00:38:26] John Michelotti: Yeah, sure, so starting with reishi. Reishi, I would say it might be my favorite. It's kind of the most overall effects. It balances and modulates different things in your body, so it does that with your immune system. So if you have an overactive immune system and you have allergies or autoimmune, it can help bring that down, and if you have an underactive immune system, it can help support that and bring that up. It can also help modulate blood pressure that helps with breathing and respiratory. It's something that people report feeling a lot more even-keeled, less spikes in dips of energy even mood, things like that.

[00:39:11] Brett Barry: I think I've seen it in Phoenicia at Wellness Rx.

[00:39:14] John Michelotti: Yeah, with Ed Ullmann, he's, yeah, incredible. He was the first person to wholesale RxTrax for Wellness Rx. Yeah, he's a huge advocate. He always has been. He told me a really profound story about a woman that flew in on a helicopter to do a retreat when he was in Tannersville, and she came in to the pharmacy with blood pressure through the roof, and he said, "Look, you know, this is at dangerous levels. You need to go to the hospital," and she said, "I'm not going to the hospital," and he said, "Then you need to call your doctor," and she said, "He's on vacation in Tahiti. You got to do something. You gotta treat me here." He gave her some reishi, and he said, "Look, you know, this is healthy stuff you can take. You can double the dose." Well, she quadrupled the dose, and he said, "You have to come back tomorrow." She came back tomorrow, and her levels had dropped significantly to the point where, you know, it was still very high, but it was no longer dangerous or threatening, so it's one of these things that can sometimes work acutely. Lion's mane is our biggest seller. It's like the easiest one to remember, and it sounds powerful and cool, so lion's mane is really excellent for brain function and nerves. It can also help with gastrointestinal function, but I feel like memory number recall. It's been studied with different brain-debilitating diseases like dementia, and most of the benefits in lion's mane you can get from eating the mushroom as well. Most of them are polysaccharides and water-soluble, which is great, but, you know, in order to eat that much lion's mane per day to get those benefits every day, it can be quite difficult, so this is where bottled it in an extract and shelf-stable makes it a lot easier. They've done different studies with eating lion's mane in soups. One of the studies had a hundred patients in a hospital with brain-debilitating diseases, and they found that from eating the lion's mane, six out of seven people had better neurological function, and seven out of seven had a higher independence measure, so they were able to, you know, dress themselves and walk and things like that. So when it comes to lion's mane, what's going on here is it has certain compounds that promote nerve growth factor, which has been shown to really stimulate neurogenesis, and one thing it can also do, it has a low molecular weight. Some of these compounds can pass through the blood-brain barrier intact and regenerate the myelin sheath of the nerves, so the sheath of your nerves—it's like the coating around an electrical wire. If that coating gets damaged and that wire then gets damaged, the lights, you know, in your house will flicker. This can be one of the causes of dementia and things like that. This is something that can actually regenerate the myelin sheath of the nerves and also helps to promote synapse growth. When you look at chaga, chaga is really excellent for digestion, detoxification, stomach, liver fortifying, so this has been utilized for hundreds of years by the Khanty people in Western Siberia. They were the ones that named it chaga, and it also has a really delicious taste of almost like vanilla. It's really quite nice, kind of like a woody vanilla, if you ever have the tea. Maitake, I would say, would be the best for blood sugar [for balancing blood sugar] and also has been studied a lot with different forms of cancer and different ways in which it can cause apoptosis in cells, which is kind of a programmed cell death. It's really great for immune system, cold and flu, and the stomach as well. Cordyceps—we talked about for endurance, really excellent for immune response as well, and adrenal function and libido. Like, it almost should come with a caution because it can really promote fertility in both males and females. It can really promote fertility. But stamina energy people take it before working out, and the last one is turkey tail. Turkey tail has been the most studied with different varieties of cancer. It's been studied with liver, prostate, breast/lung/kidney cancers, as well as an excellent immune booster, and has been shown to help with viruses: cold and flu. I feel like it's a really strong immune booster, so that's kind of the rundown of these main six.

[00:44:06] Brett Barry: Can you take them simultaneously?

[00:44:08] John Michelotti: Yeah, so as people take them, yeah, I'll take reishi, lion's mane, chaga, cordyceps. I'll take two droppers. I'll put them all in the same cup, maybe put in a little bit of juice, and drink it every day, yep.

[00:44:22] Brett Barry: For a list of extract retailers or to buy online, check out catskillfungi.com. That's also where you can get a list of upcoming mushroom talks and events and even book a private mushroom walk and learn about Catskill Fungi right from John Michelotti, a pretty fun guy himself. Sorry, I had to do it at some point. Kaatscast is hosted and produced by me, Brett Barry. This episode was recorded by Izzy Schuyler and transcribed by Jerome Kazlauskas. Announcements by Campbell Brown. Please subscribe, rate, and review so more listeners can find us. If you want to join our sponsors, please send me a note through the contact page at kaatscast.com. That's where you can also find a full list of episodes, subject-tagged and searchable. Join us as a member or pick up a Kaatscast t-shirt in a color of your choice. Sign up for our e-newsletter and follow us on Instagram [@kaatscast]. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.