Our Selection

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 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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.