Koh Samui Super Strain.

What's known

Here's what's meant to be true and not.

What we actually know

• Koh Samui Super Strain, usually shortened to KSSS, is a selection picked out of the Koh Samui strain. It is not a separate strain in its own right and not a separate species. Genetically it is a plain Psilocybe cubensis.
• The Koh Samui stock it was picked from is tied to John W. Allen's collecting on the island of Koh Samui, in the Gulf of Thailand, in the late 1980s and 1990s. The Super Strain label came later and came from spore vendors, not from Allen.
• The word 'super' is about the build of the mushroom, not its strength. The reputation is for short, very thick stems and broad caps on squat, dense fruits, where the parent is already known for being stocky.
• It drops the same standard dark purple-brown spore print as Koh Samui, and drops it readily.
• Under the microscope the spores are ordinary cubensis spores. Nothing about the selection shows on a slide; the difference, where there is one, is in the mushroom the print came from.

What the community says

• The usual story is that a vendor kept picking the squattest, thickest-stemmed Koh Samui mushrooms to print from, batch after batch, until that build was what came up every time, then sold the result as the Super Strain. Which vendor, and in which year, is told several different ways. Nobody has paperwork.
• Plenty of people say KSSS is just Koh Samui with a bigger name on the label. Others swear the fruits are noticeably fatter and shorter. Both camps are reporting what they saw, and neither can prove the syringe they had came from the same pick.
• Vendor pages sometimes call it an unusually strong cube. A cube is a cube, so read that as marketing.
• The same mix-up follows it as follows the parent: Psilocybe samuiensis is a genuinely separate species from the same island, described by Guzman, Bandala and Allen, and it is not this mushroom.
• Labels wander. Koh Samui Super Strain, KSSS, Koh Samui SS and Super Koh Samui all mean the same vendor selection.

Where it came from

Start with the parent. Koh Samui is one of the few cube names with a real place and a real collector behind it: the island of Koh Samui in the Gulf of Thailand, and John W. Allen, the man the community calls Mushroom John, who collected wild specimens across Thailand through the late 1980s and 1990s and put the island's name on the prints he brought back. The Super Strain is what happened to that stock afterwards, once it was in the hands of spore vendors.

The story most often told is that somebody kept the squattest and thickest-stemmed Koh Samui mushrooms, printed from those, and repeated the pick until the build held from one batch to the next. The result was sold as the Koh Samui Super Strain, or KSSS, and the label stuck. Who did the picking, and when, changes depending on who is telling it, so the parent has a paper trail and the Super Strain has a reputation.

Same island, same collector, same spores. The 'super' is a vendor's word for a stockier mushroom, not a new strain.

What to expect at the scope

Do not expect the selection to show up on a slide. KSSS drops a heavy, dark purple-brown print, and the spores on it are ordinary cubensis spores, the same as Koh Samui's and the same as any other cube's. What set the Super Strain apart, as far as anyone can say, was the mushroom itself: short and thick in the stem, broad and flat in the cap, dense rather than tall. That is a description of the mushroom the print came from, and it is the only thing the 'super' ever meant. As with the parent, keep it apart from Psilocybe samuiensis, the small reddish-brown species from the same island, which is a different fungus entirely.