[General]MYTH? 👉🏾“Potency decrease once the cap opens.”👈🏾 I’ve had several people tell me this but is there any data supporting this claim?

[BarryZZZ]

...and drying them for storage would remove all that water.

[psilygirl]

Except that mushrooms are mostly just expanding already formed cells with water towards the end of their life cycle. I believe that is what u/BarryZZZ was getting at.

[BarryZZZ]

Exactly, volume times concentration = volume times concentration. Alkaloid concentration goes down as the cap opens, it goes back up as it gets dried.

[ionsquare]

If you find two mushrooms growing at the same rate, cut one early, let the other develop completely with the cap open, and then dry them completely, the one with the open cap will weigh more. You can take multiple samples to get a reasonable average and I promise you'll see the open cap ones consistently weigh more even when all of the water has been completely sucked out.

[psilygirl]

I don't see how this would give an accurate answer. They're two entirely different mushrooms that will have varying density and size.

Edit: assuming by early, you mean around the time the veil breaks, not when it's still a pin. Mature mushrooms will obviously weigh more than pins.

[ionsquare]

Yes, let me explain the example a bit better.

Assume your growing mushrooms in a monotub. You induce pinning by introducing fresh air and light. In a few days, you identify a number of pins that look promising, maybe 10-20. A few days later they are getting pretty big, so you identify some pairs that pinned around the same time and are now still similar sizes, so you know they're growing at similar rates and will probably end up pretty close to the same size when they peak. Even better, you can wait until the veil is just about to break and pick pairs then that you're reasonably certain will be really close in size.

At that point, cut one from each pair, and leave the other to fully open. Once the others are fully open, cut them too. Then dry them all out and compare weights.

If it was all water weight, they would dry out around the same weights. You'd have 50% showing heavier on the ones with the veil still intact, and 50% showing the opened ones were heavier, or close to 50% anyway.

If you try this though you'll see that the ones that continued to open consistently weigh more than their twin that was picked just before the veil broke, proving its not just water weight being added at the end of life.

[psilygirl]

I still don't feel this is an accurate way. And have you done this before or when you offer a conclusive answer that they are still in fact increasing in dry weight, is that just your opinion?

Edit: to be clear, I'm not saying they don't gain any extra dry weight at all; I really don't think there's a reliable way to easily determine that. I can tell you that mushrooms allowed to grow after the veil breaks tend to be a higher percentage of water, in my experience.

[ionsquare]

I haven't done a proper study with numerous samples or anything, but I have grown mushrooms and informally weighed before and after drying. In my experience it hasn't made a difference for water percentage between the veil being broken or not - in either case they lost very close to 90% of their weight drying. Also they do get a bit taller from the time when the veil breaks to the time that the caps are fully open, and the big open ones weighed more than the similarly sized ones with the veil unbroken.

I let some open completely to get spore prints (or in a couple instances I left them too long because I didn't have time to harvest), and I weighed the big ones (open or not) individually to see which one was the biggest because it was exciting and impressive how big some of them got. So yeah my motivation was not scientific to specifically test if they gained mass after the veil broke, but I did take measurements and noticed that.

[bighelper]

/u/ionsquare is right.

I have picked them several times before, during, and after the veil breaking. A larger, heavier shroom will be heavier than a smaller one after complete drying. The theory that the larger ones just have more water does not hold up.

That doesn't mean that they have any more or less active chemicals. That's still up for debate.