Sorghum Agar Exploration PART 4

Sorghum Agar Exploration Part 4

Small update on 15 and 20gs and Future Plans.

Hi all, just wanted to give a brief update on the sorghum agar exploration. Last Time I ended up realizing 15gs sorghum syrup with 0.5gs yeast was the best so far, so I decided to do these 2 recipes this time to compare:

15gs sorghum syrup, 1g yeast, 10gs agar, 500ml water (gold colored agar in the pics)

20 gs sorghum syrup, 1g yeast, 10gs agar, 500 ml water (green colored agar in the pics)

Few overall observations:

1g of yeast extract powder seemed a bit much so i will go back to 0.5gs of yeast (same amount i use with LMEY).

20gs also seemed to be on the verge of overfeeding the mycelium with a lot of the cultures. (Of course some cultures will do the same etc.) but in overall 15gs did better on most cases.

As I already knew, Nats can be given any nutrient, ratio and they will thrive, they are just insane like that (At this point I'm starting to believe they will even grow on rock water agar 🤣

That golden plate PE7 agar (15gs recipe) is a beauty, with such beautiful spikes on the mycelium ends.

APE 338 with 20gs (green) is a good example where it shows it might been overfed vs the 15gs recipe. Way more fuzz vs the 15gs, still totally healthy etc. so no biggie but it gives a good visualization.

As Expected, not all cultures will prefer Sorghum nor all cultures thrive in the same ratios of Sorghum (just as with any grains, we need to learn and optimize the needs of each culture), so there is not given recipe that will work for your entire library. If you want to optimize your library you will need to have diff recipe ratios etc. at the very least, to satisfy the needs of each culture (this part takes time since you have to test with low, mid and high nutrient with each one) and diff nutrient sources too.
Based on the observations gathered so far, my Future plans with this includes:

Dialing back to around 15gs sorghum and 0.5g yeast for most (not all) of the cultures that thrive on sorghum.

Preparing a LME + Sorghum recipe (still undecided on ratios etc.) to see if this could bring the best of both worlds, specially for those cultures that are finicky about nutrient source.

Thanks all! Will be bringing more agar topics in the following weeks as agar is one of my passions and I'm always experimenting with it.
Mush Love,