How to Make Sterilized Grain Bags for Mushroom Growing

[Music] what's up students it's your boy pgt welcome back to class today i'm going to teach you how to make your own grain spawn bags for mushroom growing bags are a step up from quart jars and they're very efficient in creating a lot of grain spawn so for today i'll be using millet as my primary grain a reason why i want to use millets is because of all the small seeds they're very easy to break up and they create a lot of inoculation points when you break them down you're welcome to use whatever grains are available to you in your area you can use oats rye berry milo or use bird seeds too all right so the recipe i'm using for these bags consists of 1 000 gram of millet to 500 milliliters of water and it's going to create roughly 3.5 pounds of grain spawn so first thing i do is i weigh out my bags these are 10t unicorn bags they weigh about 15 to 17 grams on average i round them out to about 15 grams per bag next you want to open up your bags and we're gonna start adding our millet grain so you want about a thousand grams of millet per bag and we're going to just weigh this out to 1017 just to account for the weight of the bag there we go all right now you're going to want to measure out your water we're going to be measuring out 500 milliliters of water and if you didn't know 500 milliliters of water is equal to roughly 500 grams of water so with this we will add this directly to our green bag looks like i came up a little bit short here but that's okay we're good i'm not going to nitpick about 10 grams of water use a little bit more a little bit less as long as you're around 500 grams you'll be fine and now here i have some oats and bird seeds that i've soaked overnight with some hot water they're hydrated now and i'm going to dry them out to the proper moisture level before i sterilize them now you want the grains to be dry on the outside while still retaining moisture on the inside what i like to do is wait until half the grains seem dry and half are still kind of wet then i mix them all together to redistribute their moisture content and they're just about ready to go into your bags or jars for sterilizing also pro tip i'm using a mesh pet gate over two saw horses as my drying rack i got my gate from amazon for like 20 bucks and they work really well for this purpose for my soap grains since they're hydrated and have expanded in size what i'm going to do here is weigh them out to about 1300 to 1500 grams this is about three pounds of green spawn and it's my personal preferred size for my grain bags you can use more or less it's your grain bag so you can fill it up with however much grains you want i'm going to speed forward this part here so i'll show you guys how to prep your bags for sterilizing so with your grain bags filled up what you want to do is you follow the crease that's on the bag from the top down to the bottom where the grains are like so then once you reach down towards the bottom you make a small pinch towards the middle of the crease and then you fold the flap down over onto the bags themselves and you wrap it around the bottom so i like to leave the filter patches facing the outside of the bags i have had some issues in the past where patches would adhere to the plastic if i leave them on the inside and then when you take them out the pressure cooker and try to take them apart filter practice get damaged because it's kind of stuck to the plastic so uh pro tip there is to leave them on the outside so same process goes with my millet bags here just make a small pinch towards the middle make sure the creases are kind of straightened out and then i'll fold it over onto the bags themselves and under and just like that your bags are ready to get sterilized i like to do six bags per run with my 23 quart presto canner here's a closer look at the grain bags before i put them into the pressure canner so these soap grains here are dry on the outside but they're still plump and moist so there's no pooling of water on the bags or anything like that you want to avoid that and with the millet bags is where no silk nose trimming these uh these are still going to be a bit moist on the bags but the millet does a great job of soaking up all that water throughout the pressure cook process it's one of the most important things here you want to do for your pressure canner before you pressure cook your grain bags is to make sure that your trivet is elevated above the water so what i did is i took a normal trivet and i modified it by adding some stainless steel screws here to lift it up a little bit the typical trivets that come with the pressure canners are usually pretty short so the goal here is to get your bags to sit above the water you don't want the bags to be sitting in the water it's going to cause your bags to blow out and you'll have grains all over the pressure cooker so it's very important that you keep your grains above the water and keep them happy so with the triplet in i'm going to add in three quarts of water and this will bring up my water level to right below where the trip sits at now you can start loading your bags into your pressure canner it's okay if the bags are touching the sides of the pressure canner these bags are meant to withstand high heat for sterilizing so i'll put three bags on the bottom layer and i'll put three bags on top of those so as i put my bags into here i'll make sure that the flap that opens up the bag is on the bottom so that they the bags themselves are resting on top of the open flaps it's kind of helps to prevent the bags from opening up when they're expanding underneath the pressure of the pressure canner the last part here you want to add something on top of your bags to prevent the bags from inflating underneath pressure this could clog up the safety valve for the pressure canner and bad things can happen if this has happened to you so don't chance it put something on top to prevent your bags from doing that i'm using another trivet that i have laying around if you don't have another trivet you can also use a ceramic plate on top to do the trick as well all right with the lid popped on we're going to crank up our heat on high and we'll get this up to boiling temperature once your pressure canner starts to get up to boiling temperature you'll start to notice steam coming out of the safety lock vent here if you leave it alone it'll automatically pop up on its own i like to speed up this process by holding it down using a rag here so don't burn myself for 10 seconds and it'll release it and the pressure inside will cause that lock to pop up now with the lock up i'm going to leave this on to continue steaming for another five minutes or so i want the steam coming out of the vent hole near the gauge to have a constant stream coming out this ensures there's no air in the pressure canner before i add the weight in right now we're at a full steam i'm gonna go ahead and add my weight on top and now we'll wait for this to build up to 15 psi once we're at 15 psi let's go ahead and lower the heat on my stove keep it at a steady walking pace keep it around like medium high and set a timer for two and a half hours at 15 psi normally with grain jars you want 90 minutes with grain bags since we're dealing with a larger volume of grains really need to sterilize for a lot longer so two and a half hours after the timer goes off i'll shut the heat off and let the pressure cooker cool overnight before i open them up the next day i like to bring the pressure canner into my lab near my flow hood so i can keep them as stereo as possible when i'm working with them our first thing is i like to sanitize my gloves with 70 nicer purple alcohol before i handle anything i've also gone ahead and wiped down my table with the alcohol prior to putting my bags on them all right so with your bags ready uh you'll notice that they will have a vacuum seal on them as the grains have expanded and the pressure cook process so it's kind of hard to work with grains when there's a vacuum seal so what i do is i like to open them up a little bit so they get a little bit more air into them and then i'll go ahead and immediately seal these bags underneath an impulse sealer so what i like to do is i'll go ahead and push down on the handle on the sealer and i'll hold it there until the light goes off and i'll hold it there for a few more seconds afterwards because it's still heating up then i'll re-press to the same spot again to ensure that i have a really good seal onto this sometimes you might not get a great seal and you might have to do it a couple of times and then i like to flip the bag over and seal it once more on the opposite side uh creating a second seal in there just in case my first seal is bad i have a second seal as a backup so this kind of ensures that my bag is completely sealed all right now that we're sealed i'm going to go ahead and break apart the grains in here and what i'm going to do is mix this back up to redistribute the moisture inside here some grains are wet some greens are dry so as we shake things up here and get them all well mixed up as the bags will sit um the excess moisture from the wet grains will start to seep over to the dry grains and it'll kind of rebalance the moisture inside of the bag here if your bag is fully mixed up i like to go ahead and get all the excess grain that's sitting on top here to go back down into the bottom of the bag and you're set here's your sterilized grain bag now bags are much easier to work with if you have a flow hood with some sterile air coming out and the clean workspace to work in i'm sure the same process can be done in a steel air box as well it's just a little bit trickier with the limited space but i've seen people pull it off all right to finish out the bags we need an injection port so i'm going to be using pre-made injection ports here from micro posse so what i'm going to do is spray some alcohol on this towel and write down the surface area where i'm going to put my injection ports and i just love how easy they are to use you just peel them off and stick them onto your bags and they're ready to go i'll have links of these in the description below if you're interested in getting some for yourself be sure to use cole pgt for a discount and help support the channel with the back sealed i like to leave them out for at least another day to let the moisture redistribute in the bag before i inoculate them with any kind of culture and that's how i make my sterilized green bags i hope this helps you out your micro journey i hope you learned something today and i hope to see you again in the next video if you enjoy my content hit the like button and subscribe for more mycology videos if you wish to support me on my my college endeavors you could do so by patreon maybe you want to hang out with other micro enthusiasts and discuss more about mycology i encourage you to join the pgt mycology discord server we have over 7 000 members and we're growing every day so until next time much love from pgt

Channel: PhillyGoldenTeacher

Views: 211,201

Keywords: mycology, grow mushrooms, how to grow mushrooms, mushrooms, mushroom, grain bag, sterilized grain bags

Id: XR2MUfK8ccc

Length: 12min 24sec (744 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 13 2022