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When prepared properly, a single 750 ml liquid culture bioreactor can provide enough inoculum to cultivate thousands of pounds of mushrooms. Liquid Culture (or “LC“) can be made with common kitchen ingredients and it inoculates media faster than agar wedges. I've been troubleshooting my LC process for the past 3 years. This is what works best for me now. It's not the only way. Spotting contamination in your liquid culture is not as easy as with grain spawn or agar. You should always test your liquid culture on another media such as agar before trying to inoculate a warehouse full of expensive grain spawn (especially if your LC has been sitting in the fridge for 4 months). Note: liquid culture has become an increasingly popular cultivation tool for amateur and experienced mushroom cultivators. The popular methods used today look very different than the techniques described in popular publications such as Paul Stamet's Cultivating Gourmet and Medicinal Fungi and Tradd Cotter's Organic Mushroom Farming and Mycoremediation. In comparison, these newer techniques are bit simpler and streamlined (no need for grain “slurries“, sterilized blenders, and expensive lab equipment.) I sterilize my LC at 10 psi for 30 minutes. 15psi is also fine. Depending on the project I will alter my recipe. The simplest recipe is just mixing (by weight): 96% water 4% honey For this project I'm using a 4:1 Corn Dextrose/ Malt extract (20g per 500ml of tap water) and of Soy Peptone (Thank you to Andrew at Mossy Creek for introducing me to this recipe)
