it is blue-its not blue

[spiraleyes]

a story i heard on the edge of the forest goes like this.

an elf had spent a lovely day picking gold from the forest floor.

he went home,over the next few days he dried them out.

just messing about,he put 1 litre of water,a teaspoon or so of honey and several dried goldies in a bottle.

to his absolute amazement the water styarted to turn blue.

very light at first,then a few hours later it was getting darker until it looked like flat cola in a bottle.

surprised at how dark blue the water went,he got over it and went to bed.

the next afternoon he came home to find that the dark water was clear,slightly mercy,but still very clear.

he laughed and went to bed.

the next day he went and grabbed the bottle to see what it was doing.

he found it was still clear and went outside to tip it out over some wood mulch.

by the time he got outside,the bottle had been shaken up a bit and when he went to tip it out,he realized that the water had turned bright blue again.

any elves out there know whats going on?

[theobromos]

Nobody has done the research on what is the blue colour in psilocybes but, for the sake of argument, let us call it psindigo. Indigo is blue when oxidised and very pale yellow when reduced to the "leucoindigo". It seems likely that a dimer (two molecules stuck together) of two psilocin molecules linked at, perhaps position 5, 6 or 7 would react in much the same manner. My money would be on the 5 position.

So, when the product, psindigo, is first produced it is in the oxidised state and blue. The mushroom preparation probably fermented slightly as it was not heat-treated in any way and had sugar and plenty of other nutrients. The bacteria or yeast would take most of the oxygen out of the water and producing reducing compounds like ethanal. These reduce the blue psindigo to the clear leucopsindigo.

When the bottle is shaken the oxygen in the air quickly builds up in the water and either directly oxidises the leucopsindigo back to the blue psindigo or first oxidises other compounds present which then oxidise the leucopsindigo.

[Torsten]

he, he, nice try theo, but I think in this case the explanation is a little more simple. The spores are purplish and in water give it a blue appearance. When there are heaps of spores in suspension it gets really dark, almost black, but with only a few it is a metallic blue.

When the jar rests overnight, the spores fall out of suspension and settle at the bottom. Once you move it again the spores suspend again.

In fact this is a good way to make your tea taste nicer (spores seem to give it a very mushroomy flavour), by freezing the settled spore jar (plastic only) and then scraping or melting the bottom section off, thus removing the spores and minimal amount of anything else.

Psindigo.... I like it.

[spiraleyes]

when the spores fall to the bottom,would thet still not be psindigo?

[Torsten]

na, they are just a little blackish sediment. they only turn the water bluish once in suspension.

[Guest reville]

Torsten i have to disagree totally on the spore idea and go with the original or at least the general idea.

Lets say for hypothetical reasons that one was to go out and pick whole lot of very young mushrooms still in mid development which were added to a water/Ethanol mix. These fruitbodies do not even have gills leta alone spores.

And if this was left for a day or so the mix would turn a Dark blue colour. Likewise when pieces of dry white stem came into contahct with water droplets the same blue colouration would occur.

However in this magical world if they were put into Ethanol with a purity over 90% there Minimal disclouration which then faded to none and ended up as the desvribed clear/amber tinted liquid.

In all these cases the degree of blueing increases proportionately with the amount of water in solution.

If spores were to account for colouration then a)stem fragments would not do this b)discolouration would occur regardless of water/alcohol ratios to a similar degree (and if anything increasing alcohol tends to draw out*more* not less pigments).

Finally the best comparison to make would be between a spore syringe and a jar of 'Blue juice', there simply isnt one.

[Guest reville]

http://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.p...=5&o=&fpart=all

[spiders]

i have no idea - never seen that before.

[Torsten]

well rev, maybe we are talking about two different blues and two different situations. my blue can be 'fixed' by filtering through very fine filterpaper, so presumably not a solute.

can't say I've ever seen a tea/brew made from white shroms only, so can't comment on that.

maybe it has something to do with refraction.

[theobromos]

kt asked me to post this for him:

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The primary problem with this argument is that psilocin will do this without any plant material being present. It will do this color change from normal enzymes, from M. edulis gill enzymes or from a iron induced reaction. If it was spores, then the addition of ascorbic acid to an aqueous extract would not decolorize it (easily proven at home). It would also not be a situation where the blue color can be extracted from said nonblue ascorbic acid solution with hexane (returning to its blue color in the hexane solution).

A rather large volume of literature has been written on this subject despite the actual blue and nonblue forms never being structurally worked out. (please see details inside the new tryptamine book which should be in your hands now)

theo's proposed model is at least the best thing I've seen presented so far. I asked Sasha about it a while back and he liked it to (hypothetical though it may be). He especially liked it being drawn from the natural world and the example of indigo and leucoindigo.

It IS important to remember that the chromophore is very intense so only tiny bits of the material have to be altered this way for the blue to be quite visible.

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