Pink Buffalo.

What's known

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

What we actually know

• It is a Thai strain of Psilocybe cubensis tied to the island of Koh Samui in southern Thailand. Not a hybrid, not a separate species.
• It is most often credited to the American ethnomycologist John W. Allen, known online as Mushroom John, who is said to have collected it in the late 1990s.
• The mushroom itself is not pink. The name refers to a rare pink-hued water buffalo reportedly seen near the rice paddies where it was found.
• It throws reddish-gold to caramel caps, bruises blue-green readily, and drops a standard dark purple-brown cubensis print that deposits well for study.

What the community says

• The story goes that John Allen found it after following buffalo tracks and dung through rice paddies near Phang Ka beach on Koh Samui.
• A competing account, relayed by Allen himself on the forums, credits mycologist Milo Zverino with collecting the strain from Ban Saket, Thailand around the year 2000.
• One telling has the strain named for a sacred Koh Samui plant called the buffalo carnation, but nobody has been able to turn up such a flower.
• Allen has pushed back on the romance, noting the pink buffalo was nothing sacred and that perhaps one in ten Thai water buffalo simply carry a pinkish hue.
• It often gets sold as a specially potent Asian strain, but a cube is a cube and strain-to-strain strength claims are largely overstated.

Where it came from

Pink Buffalo is one of the better travel stories in the cubensis world, and like most good travel stories it gets retold a few different ways. The thread everyone agrees on is the setting: the island of Koh Samui, off the southern coast of Thailand, where this dung-loving cube turns up in the warm, wet rice paddies. The usual credit goes to John W. Allen, the American ethnomycologist better known online as Mushroom John, who is said to have collected it in the late 1990s while wandering through Thailand, Cambodia and Burma.

By most accounts Allen spotted a lone pink-hued water buffalo grazing near the paddies, went to have a look, and found the mushrooms growing in the dung along its tracks. He reportedly named the strain for that animal. He has also, by some tellings, been keen to deflate the mysticism around it, pointing out that the buffalo was nothing sacred and that roughly one in ten Thai water buffalo carry that pinkish tint anyway. So the mushroom is not pink, and never was. The buffalo was.

The version is that the find has two fathers. Allen gets most of the credit, but a rival account, reportedly passed on by Allen himself, hands it to Milo Zverino around 2000.

What to expect at the scope

That second account names mycologist Milo Zverino as the collector, gathering the strain from Ban Saket, Thailand around the year 2000. A third, vaguer telling claims the name comes from a sacred Koh Samui plant called the buffalo carnation, except no one has managed to turn up a flower by that name. Treat the dates, the names and the route through the paddies as community lore rather than settled history. What is not in doubt is that this is a plain, good-looking Thai Psilocybe cubensis that has been passed around collectors for two decades.