Home / Magic Mushroom Spores / Psilocybe Cubensis / Our Selection
Psilocybe cubensis
Our Selection
Our house pick of Psilocybe cubensis: a dependable, classic-looking cube chosen for clean, heavy spore drops rather than a famous backstory. A curator's choice labelled.
★★★★★ 4.9 · 58 reviewsChoose your format
Some formats are out of stock
Want to know the moment it returns?
Sold for microscopy, taxonomy and collecting only. Not for cultivation.
filled under laminar flow
plain packaging, tracked
The short version
Our Selection is exactly what the name says: a house-chosen Psilocybe cubensis, picked for being a generous, reliable depositor with textbook-clean spores rather than for any documented lineage. It is not a wild landrace or a named hybrid, and we will not pretend it has a famous origin myth. Think of it as a well-behaved, classic cube curated for the microscope.
Straight talk
Fact vs. legend
There is a lot of folklore around this strain. Here is which bits are real, side by side.
What we actually know
- It is a plain Psilocybe cubensis. Not a separate species, not a hybrid, not a leucistic or albino line.
- Our Selection is a house label rather than a documented genetic strain. It has no published origin story in the usual mycology forums or wikis, and we will not invent one.
- It was chosen for the qualities that make a cube easy to study: broad caps, crowded gills and a heavy, dependable spore deposit.
- As a standard cubensis it drops a dark purple-brown to near-black print in mass, the same as the textbook species description.
- Strength is a cultivation question, not a strain badge. As the saying goes, a cube is a cube, and we make no potency claims for collectors.
What the community says
- The name is the whole story here. "Our Selection" is said to mean simply the variety the shop settled on as its everyday workhorse, not a secret line with a hidden pedigree.
- Because house picks rarely keep paperwork, the exact parent material is not documented. By most accounts it traces back to ordinary, widely circulated cubensis stock rather than anything exotic.
- Vendor house names like this one are sometimes assumed to be rebadged Golden Teacher or B+. That is a reasonable guess for any unbranded cube, but it is guesswork, not record. Treat it as community speculation.
The story
The one: a house pick, not a hero myth
Most famous cubes come with an origin legend, a named collector, a jungle, a date. Our Selection has none of that, and that is the point. The name is not coy marketing for a secret lineage. It is literally what it says: the Psilocybe cubensis we settled on as a dependable everyday variety, chosen for how cleanly it behaves in the lab rather than for a story we could put on a poster.
We could have dressed it up. Plenty of house picks get retro-fitted with a tale about a vanished hobbyist or a far-flung dung pasture. We would rather be straight with you. There is no documented isolation event, no creator name and no place of origin we can point to and stand behind, and inventing one would be the easiest way to lose your trust. By most accounts a label like this traces back to ordinary, widely shared cubensis stock, the same gene pool that gives us the classic broad-capped, heavy-dropping cube.
If you want a famous backstory, plenty of strains have one. If you want a clean, generous spore print from a cube we are happy to vouch for, this is the one we reach for.
Why a curator's choice still matters
For a collector the useful question is not "who named it" but "does it deposit well and read clearly under glass". This is where Our Selection earns its place. It was picked for a heavy, even spore drop and the textbook subellipsoid, thick-walled spores the species is known for, the sort of sample that makes focusing your first objective genuinely satisfying. No surprises, no novelty, just a well-mannered cube. Simple framing, simple mushroom.
The species
Meet Psilocybe cubensis
Our Selection is a collector’s line of a single, well-travelled species. Psilocybe cubensis was first written up in 1906 by the American mycologist Franklin Sumner Earle, from a specimen found in a cattle field in Cuba, which is where the name comes from. He originally called it Stropharia cubensis; Rolf Singer moved it into the genus Psilocybe in 1948.
The genus name is a tidy bit of Greek: psilos (“bare”) plus kubē (“head”), for the smooth, peelable skin of the cap, so the full name reads roughly as “the bare-headed mushroom from Cuba.”
- Family
- Hymenogastraceae (older books say Strophariaceae)
- Genus
- Psilocybe (Fr.) P. Kumm., 1871
- Species
- Psilocybe cubensis (Earle) Singer, 1948
- Basionym
- Stropharia cubensis Earle, 1906
- This product
- Our Selection, a collector’s cultivar of the species
- Type locality
- Cuba (where it was first named)
How you’d know it
Field marks
These describe the mature mushroom for reference and identification.
Classic golden-brown cap
As a standard cubensis you can expect a broad, smooth cap, golden to caramel brown and often paler toward the rim, flattening with age and frequently keeping a low central bump. Nothing exotic in the colouring, which is exactly what a dependable house pick should look like.
Pale fibrous stem with a ring
Whitish to off-white, thickening toward the base, with the remains of a partial veil leaving an annulus that usually ends up dusted purple-brown as the spores ripen and rain down onto it.
Gills that darken with ripeness
Crowded and pale grey when young, deepening through purple-brown to near-black in mass as the basidia mature. This is the heavy, even depositing that the line was selected for.
Blue bruising
Handle the flesh and it bruises blue-green, the classic Psilocybe tell, an enzyme turning psilocybin into psilocin which then oxidises into blue pigments. Standard for the species.
Where it comes from
A dung-lover with a wanderer’s history
Psilocybe cubensis is coprophilic, a fancy word for dung-loving. In the wild it lives on the droppings of big grazing animals, classically cattle and water buffalo, fruiting from warm, humid pasture. It does not grow on wood and it does not partner with tree roots.
You’ll find it across the warm parts of the world: the Gulf Coast of the United States, Mexico, Central and South America, Southeast Asia and Australia. It was named from Cuba, but where the lineage truly began is an open question. A 2026 study describing its closest wild relative in southern Africa suggests the deep roots are Old-World, the mushroom having apparently travelled with grazing herds long before anyone gave it a Latin name.
The main event
Under the microscope
This is what you actually bought the spores for. Put a print or a drop from a syringe on a slide and here’s what shows up.
- Shape & size. Smooth, thick-walled and subellipsoid, like a slightly squashed rugby ball, roughly 11.5–17 µm long by 8–11 µm wide (the figures Paul Stamets settled on).
- The germ pore. Look for a single pale, flattened dot at one end. That’s the one thin spot in the wall where, in nature, a mushroom would begin, and a real cubensis hallmark.
- Pale alone, dark in a crowd. A single spore looks honey-amber with the light behind it; only in a mass do they read deep purple-brown to black. So a near-black print but pale spores on the slide is normal optics, not a dud.
- What you’ll need. Find the field at 100×, study shape and the germ pore at 400×, and get the wall crisp at 1000× under oil. A touch of methylene blue or KOH lifts the contrast.
- The legal bit, and why it’s true. A dormant spore carries no psilocybin or psilocin at all; that chemistry only appears later in living tissue. That is exactly why the spores are legal to own and study in the UK.
Choose your format
Print, syringe, vial or swab?
Same lab-grade genetics in every option. The honest difference is shelf life versus how soon you’re at the scope.
Spore print
Keeps longest
Spores dropped straight onto sterile foil. Stored cool and dry it outlasts everything else here, so it’s the one to reach for if you’re building a collection to keep for years.
Spore syringe
Ready tonight
Spores suspended in sterile water, ready to go straight onto a slide. The quickest way to be looking down the microscope this evening. Comes in 3 mL and 12 mL.
Vial & swab
Compact
A sealed glass vial is a tidy middle ground; a sterile swab is the most travel-friendly, robust little format for adding a strain to your reference set.
At a glance
The spec sheet
- Species
- Psilocybe cubensis
- Strain
- Our Selection (collector’s cultivar)
- Spore print
- Dark purple-brown to near-black, heavy depositor
- Spore shape
- Subellipsoid, smooth, thick-walled, with a germ pore
- Spore size
- ~11.5–17 × 8–11 µm
- Basidia
- Mostly 4-spored, ~20–30 × 7–10 µm
- Wild habitat
- Coprophilic, on herbivore dung & warm pasture
- Climate
- Subtropical to tropical
- Intended use
- Microscopy, research & collecting only
Dig deeper
Further reading
Independent, non-commercial sources, no shops, just good information.
- Psilocybe cubensis on Wikipedia: the species overview.
- The genus Psilocybe: taxonomy and the family reshuffle.
- Index Fungorum: the formal nomenclature record.
- Proc. Royal Society B (2026): the African wild-relative study.
Common questions
Frequently asked
Yes, for microscopy and research. A dormant spore contains no psilocybin or psilocin, so the spores themselves are not a controlled substance in the UK. We sell them strictly for microscopy, taxonomy and collecting, never for cultivation.
No, and we will not pretend otherwise. It is our house label for a dependable, classic Psilocybe cubensis we chose as an everyday variety. It has no documented isolation, creator or place of origin. That is deliberate.
There is no published record tying it to a specific named line. The reasonable assumption for any unbranded house cube is ordinary, widely circulated cubensis stock, but that is community guesswork rather than something we can document, so we leave it at that.
Smooth, subellipsoid, thick-walled spores, pale amber individually and dark purple-brown to near-black in a mass, each with a small germ pore at one end. Find them at 100x, study them at 400x, and get the wall sharp at 1000x under oil.
If you want something that keeps for years on a shelf, take the print. If you want to be at the microscope tonight, take the syringe. The vial and swab sit in between on convenience.
Cool, dark and dry. A fridge (not freezer) is ideal for syringes and vials, and prints keep happily in a sealed bag somewhere cool. Stored well, a print stays viable for study for years.
What customers say
Reviews
Very happy with this so far.. excited to see the results!
Fast delivery, well packed
asked for a random spore kit ;i will keep you posted on how things will pan out
Fantastic.
Very happy with the product :)
Great product, but no support.
Reply from Cylocybe
Thanks for the 5 Stars, however we do provide support and always always always have done. During our busiest times (Sep-November), expect delays in emails - sorry!
Ask the community
Questions and answers
No questions yet. Yours could be the first.
For microscopy, taxonomy and collecting only.Sold for legal research. Not for cultivation. Spores contain no controlled substances. We trust you to be responsible.