Ffyngau

Ffyngau came out of me getting far too interested in mushrooms.

I was already growing mushrooms at home when Lion’s Mane sent me off in a different direction. I started reading about the organism, then the chemistry, then the traditional use, then the research, and before long I was growing more species, buying different extracts to see what people were actually selling and disappearing into papers that had very little to do with whatever I had originally intended to do that evening. I eventually wrote my dissertation around fungi as well, so by that point it was probably safe to say the interest had stuck.

The more I read, the more I realised how much gets flattened once mushrooms become supplements. Reishi can mean several different species. Lion’s Mane research can involve fruiting body, mycelium or both. Cordyceps is an entire argument before you even get to the first clinical trial. Then you have extraction methods, ratios, growing methods, old Chinese texts, modern chemistry, animal studies, human trials and several hundred websites cheerfully mixing the lot together.

That is really where Ffyngau came from. I wanted to make good mushroom extracts, but I also wanted to know what the mushrooms actually were and what the research genuinely said about them. That is why the research library has become such a big part of the site. I find the fungi themselves more interesting than the claims made about them, and I would rather leave a question unanswered than tidy it up into something that sells better.

Grym is the product side of that. The current Lion’s Mane and Reishi extracts are grown and extracted in Wales, made from fruiting body and produced at a 1:4 ratio of dry mushroom to finished liquid. Simple enough on the bottle. The fungi behind them are considerably less simple.