FAQ

First off, the Shrüm All-In-One Grow Bag is radical new technology. This changes the game with a whole new mushroom growing methodology. More on that below.

Growing your own shrooms is now radically simple.

Mycology is hard, complex, time consuming, and labor intensive; near 100% failure rate for new growers.

You shouldn’t have to be an automotive engineer to drive a car, or a computer scientist to use a computer.
You shouldn’t have to be a mycologist to grow quality mushrooms you love.

Our team at Advanced Mycology strained ourselves over the last 2 years to develop and deliver an all-in-one grow bag that is as simple as INJECT, WAIT, and HARVEST.

Waiting is the hardest part of the process. However, you get to experience the miracle of life, from mycelium to mushrooms. Fascinating to watch. Seeing your new baby mushrooms start to pin up from the surface will never stop pulling at your heart.

This new mushroom grow tech means growing mushrooms is now decentralized.
This is your private personal garden.
You are now no longer concerned with what a bulk grower decides to grow, how he grows, or what a middle man decides to carry.

Find liquid culture (or spores) of the artisan genetics for the profound mushrooms you love, and grow your own, easily and discretely on any available surface.

Because the grow bag is your fortress against bacteria and mold, you don’t need a dedicated grow clean space. You can grow beautiful mushrooms in this grow bag in a dirty mechanic shop, in your closet, or on your floor if you like. Lighting isn’t even critical (these are fungi, not plants). The box is about 8″x5″, you just need that much surface area somewhere.

Yes, you’ll save money growing your own mushroom fruits over buying them on the market, but that’s hardly the main reason to use an all-in-one mushroom grow bag. While you experience the miracle of growing your own profound artisan mushrooms so conveniently, it’s a nice bonus that you’re also keeping more money in your pocket.  

It’s so easy and convenient, that if you want to try out growing a few different varietals in a few different grow bags, you’ll be able to hook up your entire Burning Man camp. These are deeply beautiful gifts. Sometimes it’s fun to be Santa.

Glad you asked : )

1)  Filter Strips

The most important radical new tech here is the filter strips.
This creates an entirely new grow method. The easiest way to grow your own shrooms.

Mushroom grow bags do exist, but they all have a problem. You’re not actually supposed to harvest from the grow bag.
With all mushroom grow bags on the market, before any baby mushroom fruits start to pin, you are supposed to remove the colonized block of substrate from the bag, and put it into a monotub or an open air grow tent to fruit; THEN harvest.

That means you need to create an entire mushroom grow operation and invest in setting up a dedicated grow clean space. Showering and washing your hands doesn’t cut it. You need to gain a deep understanding of sterility and sanitization. You need to buy the proper equipment and adopt proper lab sterile practices. You need to buy totes and drill holes to create monotubs, or set up a sterile open air grow tent with precise humidity control. And you have to play detective on every failure for months until you finally dial it in. It sucks, we’ll explain more about why below.

The mushroom grow bags that currently exists are not actually mushroom grow bags, they are mycelium colonization bags. A tool for mycology operations, meant primarily for open air tent grows; currently available mushroom grow bags are not an optimal method to grow mushrooms on their own.

The reason these mushroom grow bags on the market are not true all-in-one grow bags, is because of their filter patch.
The filter patch let’s in air while keeping out mold and bacteria, but the patch is up high at the top of the bag.
Like us, Mushrooms breathe Oxygen in and CO2 out. CO2 is heavier than O2, so the carbon dioxide builds up sitting down along the surface level, with no easy way out.
High CO2 levels are ok during colonization, but once baby mushroom fruits start to pin, they enter this world struggling for oxygen, unable to breathe. This causes your mushrooms to grow fuzzy as they aerate mycelium to increase surface area trying to find oxygen. This lowers the quality of your mushrooms, and your yield amount.
That’s why every filter patch grow bag on the market recommends you remove the block from the grow bag once it’s colonized, and place it into a monotub or a sterile open air tent to fruit.

The ShrümTM All-In-One Grow Bag changes the game with unique .2 micron Filter Strips that provide significantly better fresh air exchange, while establishing a fortress against bacteria and mold.
The key to fresh air is letting CO2 out.
There’s a single filter strip just above the substrate surface at the back of the bag to draw CO2 out.
The better airflow from filter strips creates more of a monotub micro climate, less like you’re growing mushrooms in a plastic bag.
Just like us, mushrooms are happier when they have more fresh air to breathe.

2) Substrate Blend

But that’s not all.
Airflow isn’t the only piece of this puzzle.
A major part of the secret sauce is our proprietary substrate blend.
Your substrate is the medium your mycelium grows in that provides all the nutrition and material to develop profound mushrooms that thrive.

This is where it gets connoisseur.
At Advanced Mycology, substrate blends have been our most involved obsession. We’ve iterated on the substrate blend dozens of times before we settled on the final substrate blend we are proud to finally release to you.
We lab tested each iteration of substrate blend to monitor pH levels, and watch how the substrate performs in the real world with our favorite artisan varietals.
But we are not done, we will never be done, we will keep iterating and improving our substrate blend forever, because we are obsessive like that. 

We’re not keeping it a secret. After trying out dozens of substrate blends, our optimal substrate ingredients are: Millet, Coco Coir, Vermiculite, Gypsum, Worm Castings, and Crushed Oyster Shell, hydrated with water to field capacity.

The more involved obsession comes from trying to find the optimal ratios among those variables.
Forever driven on that endless pursuit of the most incredible blend. 

3) Shelf Life

Finally, let’s discuss shelf life. Mycology products fail for the same reason other fresh food gets ruined, bacteria and mold.
Spores of mold and endospores of bacteria can survive the extreme heat of sterilization. Growing mushrooms is a race against time from the point of sterilization, to inoculate your mycelium and let that colony develop before competing mold and bacteria colonies develop to claim your nutrient rich environment as their territory.
Mycology is war, and we must win; we do not want to grow bacteria and mold.
Mushrooms will not grow in areas colonized by bacteria or mold.

We’ve developed a proprietary sterilization technique that we believe solves this problem, giving our grow bags theoretically indefinite shelf life. The honest truth is we won’t know until 2 years from now if we truly have a product with multi-year shelf life.

But we’re not taking any chances.
Each ShrümTM All-In-One Grow Bag also comes vacuum sealed. This preserves freshness. By vacuum sealing each grow bag immediately after it’s been sterilized, the absence of oxygen inhibits bacteria and mold, basically preserving the grow bag in the same state it was in immediately after sterilization.

Long story short… these are some of the mycology challenges we tackle behind the scenes to make sure that when you INJECT, you can simply WAIT to HARVEST something glorious.

The short answer is the Shrüm^TM All-In-One Grow Bag is designed to be a super simple personal garden. Tubs and Tent mushroom growing are meant for larger yields.

In other words, we’ve created the first Personal Computer of growing mushrooms with this all-in-one grow bag, while tubs and tents are Complex Large Business Systems that require trained specialists and significant maintenance.

But let’s get into it.
You’ll gain some perspective on how transformative this new grow method is.

Of course there are multiple ways to successfully grow quality mushrooms.
At Advanced Mycology we are searching for optimal, and as simple as possible.

Our team at Advanced Mycology has been growing mushrooms and consulting on large mushroom grows for years. And we have opinions.
Let’s compare growing mushrooms in Tents, Tubs, and All-In-One Grow Bags.

Tents:
Open Air Sterile Tents is our most hated method to grow mushrooms. Theoretically it’s efficient, you create one humid sterile climate and just leave colonized mycelium blocks on racks to fruit.

The reality of tents is miserable. Never again.
The efficiency of your environment is turned upside down when mold efficiently spreads throughout your tent, efficiently ruining your entire grow you spent so much energy and time and money and emotion setting up. You really should shower each time you enter your mushroom grow tent, and even that doesn’t prevent you from quickly introducing contamination mold and bacteria. I’ve seen growers try to work grow tents in hooded tyvek suits after isopropyl alcohol spray down baths each time they enter, and that’s just ridiculous. Who wants to live that life?

And tents are a dripping wet mess. You need to keep humidity above 95%, the floor of the tent is always wet. And because you need to maintain a positive air pressure environment, humidity constantly leaks out of the tent. We’ve seen too many real life nightmares of tent grows flooding water into the floors below, or creating mold inside the walls of the room the tent is in.

Open air grow tents are simply not pleasant to operate.
They are strictly for large bulk growers, and the most experienced growers.
Too many beginners try to set up bulk grow tents with dreams of glory, and they always fail.

Seriously, nearly every open air tent grow operation we’ve seen has shut down. It’s not fun.

Tubs:
Monotubs are actually our preferred large grow method. They are A LOT of work. And kind of tedious to maintain and deal with, but results don’t lie, monotubs yield beautiful mushrooms.

Each Monotub creates an isolated environment of adequate humidity and airflow while providing some protection against the spread of mold and bacteria.

You still need to set up a dedicated grow clean space for your monotubs.
You need air purifiers. You need to fan your monotubs twice a day. You need to mist your monotubs daily. You need to drill holes into totes to create monotubs. You need to cut liners for them each time you set up a new grow. After you harvest you need to dump your monotub and clean it thoroughly before you set up a new grow. We can go on…

Monotubs mean a lot of tasks added to your daily todo list. We do it because we love our mushrooms.

Monotubs are optimal for growers seeking yield. Only for those intending to grow significantly more than they consume. We’ve consulted on operations running over 800 monotubs in warehouses, and those operations are kind of insane. 1 or a few monotubs is manageable, but it’s still an operation.

Nearly all cubensis optimized starter mushroom grow kits are some sort of basic monotub operation. You still need to learn mycology, you have a crazy list of messy tasks, and you can expect a failure rate around 90%.

All-In-One Grow Bags:

The beauty of the Shrüm^TM All-In-One Grow Bag is how simple it is.
This is your own personal grow that will likely yield you enough for a year supply from just 1 grow bag. If you want to grow your own fruits, it’s easy to see why this is a better way:

• Insanely Simple
• Takes up very little space
• Can be set up on any surface
• Virtually no risk of contamination
• One step process to achieve fruiting
• Minimal cleanup
• No fanning
• No misting
• No continuous maintenance
• No strict humidity controls
• No need to make your own spawn and substrate

Tubs:

• Impressive yield of beautiful fruits
• Requires a lot of room
• Requires a dedicated sterile grow space
• Lots of potential contamination vectors
• Complex process to achieve fruiting
• A lot of clean-up required
• Need to fan tubs twice daily for air
• Need to mist tubs daily for hydration
• Constant maintenance

Tents:

• Extreme contamination risk
• Extreme sterility required
• Wet miserable experience
• Prone to flooding floor below and soaking walls of room
• Requires strict humidity control
  
• Theoretically more efficient, but seriously, no

Here we’ve only compared fruiting methodologies (bags vs. tubs vs. tents). Most new growers don’t get to experience fruiting for many months as it takes a while to first succeed at creating viable spawn, on top of the mess of mixing and pasteurizing soil to create substrate. These massive hassles are eliminated with your all-in-one grow bag.

• Control. You control the genetics: you can choose your artisan varietal that a grower focused on yield might never choose to grow.
• Discretion. Growing in the privacy of your home allows you to know exactly what you have and how much of it, while reducing risk from black market transaction.
• Prices. Depending on the market, a half ounce of mushrooms on the street should cost you significantly more than buying a grow bag and your choice of varietal in liquid culture.
• Quality. Black market mushrooms are wildly inconsistent, with no guarantee on quality. Quite simply it’s shocking how much bullshit is out there.
• Experience. If only your chia pet could bring you to a stargate. Well now it can! You get to experience the miracle of life, from mycelium to mushrooms, and watch your babies grow! There’s nothing quite like the glory of something you grew yourself, bringing you to a magical kingdom of exploration and wonder. 
• Potential.  If you successfully get through your first harvest and keep your bag clean, you can use our (upcoming) Replenish Kit and grow MORE fruits from the same grow bag! Through multiple harvests our testers sometimes pulled more than an ounce of dried fruit from a single grow bag.

When inoculating your grow bag with liquid culture, fruits should begin to form in 4-5 weeks. You should be able to harvest in 5-6 weeks after inoculation.
Spores take a couple weeks longer. If you inoculate your grow bag with spores you should be able to harvest in 6-8 weeks.

We’ve successfully tested at Shelf Life of 6 months so far, which is why we are currently offering the following guarantee:

Advanced Mycology will fully refund or replace any grow bag that contaminates within 6 months of manufactured date printed on the box; or until injection port is pierced, whichever occurs first.

Theoretically Shelf Life is much longer. This is a new product. We are still discovering the true limits of our shelf life.

Harvest size will depend on varietal, but preliminary testing found a consistent half ounce of dried weight after the first harvest.

Our grow bag contains millet, substrate and water. There’s nothing illegal about it.

NOTE: Advanced Mycology does not sell any spores, liquid culture, or any other form of mushroom genetics. Our products do not contain mushrooms, or any mushroom mycelium. Our ShrümTM All-In-One Grow Bag is a medium to grow many kinds of mushrooms.  Customers must independently obtain spores or liquid culture from other sources. Advanced Mycology is not in any way responsible for the type of mushrooms customers decide to grow.

We designed this grow bag to minimize your effort.

Just remember that mushrooms are like us – they’re most comfortable at 68-78 degrees. 72 or 73 degrees is perfect.

Mushrooms like natural light. They’re not plants, they can grow in the dark, but they reach toward the light. So any small amount of light from above will produce straighter fruits.
Do Not grow your mushrooms under a cannabis grow light! You’ll burn your fruits and dry them out.

Mushrooms like humidity. Your grow bag comes hydrated, and it is a small ecosystem maintaining its own humidity. 

You’ll want to clean off any soil from the bottom of your mushroom. You need to dehydrate your mushrooms if you’re not consuming them immediately. You can use any basic dehydrator you can find at stores or online, or even lay your mushrooms out in front of a fan until they’re cracker dry.

In the retail box with your Grow Bag, we include a Mylar Storage Bag with Dry Pack for long term storage of your dried mushrooms. 

There are no returns. 
Advanced Mycology will replace any grow bag that contaminates within 6 months of manufactured date; or until outer vauum sealed bag is removed, whichever occurs first.