Basics : Milo (Red Dari) Sterile Grain for Mushroom Grain Spawn

This might well be my favourite grain experiment so far, the early test were remarkable. Super quick colonisation, Blue Oyster from 20% break-and-shake to fully colonised in 48 hours. Mental.

It’s part of the job that’s pretty cool, to be honest. We get to dick around and try out different things, if they work we put them out to test pilots in our Discord community, and then if everyone’s happy we roll it out for general use. 

So why red dari instead of the other grains? Once again, it’s a bit of a personal choice thing. Red dari’s a slightly larger grain than millet, but has a much cooler name. It’s like a gang name. If you were called “Red Dari” in your friend group then you had a cooler name than the poor fucker that got called “Millet”, hands-down. Here’s the secret though: Red Dari is only one of this little secret agent bastard’s names. It’s actually sorghum (sorghum bicolor), and god this gets into some conspiracy theory style shit because another name for it is “Giant Millet”. What a massive and awful fuck-you to millet, it just never ends.

The grain’s got a great selection of vitamins and minerals that you need to grow big healthy mushrooms, like B1 (thiamine) and B3 (niacin), you’ve also got your magnesium and iron in there which all helps. Phosphorus? Yup. It’s the right blend that’s going to make sure your mycelium has all it needs to produce some decent flushes once you’ve added this to your substrate. 

In the non-mycological world, people use it for normal grain stuff, like making bread, booze, syrups, that kinda stuff due to the carbohydrate content. It’s really bloody good for growing mushrooms with though so let's do that instead.

We give it a nice wash like it was a loved one, bag it up, then pressure cook it to make sure it’s pasteurised like we would an enemy, and that’s about it, c’est magnifique!

✅ Red, and it actually does go faster so that’s interesting

✅ Sterilised to perfection

✅ Can make booze out of it if you’re desperate

✅ Buy more? Pay less!

✅ Needs to be mixed with whatever substrate you like once colonised

Have more questions about grain? Check out our Grain FAQ!

Storage:

• Use it quickly if you can but it’ll be good for six weeks
• Cool and dark/yes once more/store it like your peppercorns
• Keep upright, don’t block the filter or it won’t breathe
• No freezing, please