Sam started with one log and a lot of questions

I'm Sam. I've been identifying fungi in Central Texas for over a decade — first as an obsessive amateur photographing every toothed and gilled thing I could find on live oak, then as a cultivator learning to grow lion's mane on hardwood the way it grows in the wild.

Sam the Fungi LLC exists because I got tired of reading supplement labels that told me nothing. Too many bottles are milled grain with a mushroom drawing on the front. So I built the opposite: fruiting body only, dual extracted, one lot at a time, with a lab report published for each release.

Mycology practice, not marketing

Every batch starts with strain selection and a hardwood substrate, gets harvested at peak fruiting, and is dried low and slow before extraction. I run a hot-water pass and an alcohol pass on each lot, then recombine them and send a sample to an independent lab for active-compound potency testing (hericenones) before anything gets labeled.

The Central Texas Mycological Society partnership

I lead field walks and identification sessions in collaboration with the Central Texas Mycological Society. Observations logged on our Geeky Gallops walks get shared back into regional records, which means a Saturday morning with a hand lens actually contributes something to what we know about Texas fungi.

If you'd rather learn in the woods than from a label, that's the door I'd point you toward first.