Know what you are looking at.
Wild Psilocybe species and the cultivated varieties you will hear named on a shop counter — field marks, habitat, and the lookalikes that put people in hospital. Reference only: no doses, no growing, no advice.
Wild species
Blue Foot
Psilocybe caerulipes
A small, easily overlooked wood-lover of eastern North American hardwood forests, named for the blue bruising that shows most strongly at the base of the stem. Uncommon, and routinely lost among other little brown mushrooms despite a fairly wide range.
Flying Saucer
Psilocybe azurescens
A large, cold-tolerant wood-lover confined to a narrow strip of Pacific coastline, with some of the highest psilocybin concentrations recorded in any mushroom. Closely related to the wavy cap, but generally bigger and stronger.
Liberty Cap
Psilocybe semilanceata
A small, slender grassland mushroom named for its sharply pointed crown, the liberty cap is the most widespread psilocybin species in temperate Europe and one of the most potent per gram in the entire genus. Unlike its dung-fruiting relatives, it feeds on decaying grass roots in pasture soil.
Ovoid
Psilocybe ovoideocystidiata
A springtime wood-lover first described in 2001, common along Midwestern and mid-Atlantic riverbanks and increasingly reported in urban mulch beds. Notable for fruiting months earlier than most temperate Psilocybe species.
Psilocybe cubensis
The most widely known psilocybin mushroom and the species behind nearly every cultivated variety you will hear named. A robust, dung-loving mushroom with a pan-tropical native range, it stands apart from most other Psilocybe species by its size and its preference for herbivore dung over wood or grass.
Subaeruginosa
Psilocybe subaeruginosa
The dominant wild psilocybin mushroom of southern Australia and New Zealand — a wood and litter decomposer found in native eucalypt forest, pine plantations, and urban parkland, with psilocybin content that varies widely between collections.
Teonanácatl
Psilocybe mexicana
A small, unassuming grassland mushroom carrying outsized history: the species used in centuries-old Mazatec, Mixtec, and Zapotec ceremonies in Oaxaca, and the mushroom from which Albert Hofmann first isolated and named psilocybin and psilocin in 1958.
Wavy Cap
Psilocybe cyanescens
A wood-loving Psilocybe named for the undulating margin of its caramel-to-chestnut cap. Among the most potent psilocybin mushrooms ever tested, it has spread far beyond its native Pacific Northwest range by hitchhiking in commercial landscaping mulch.
Cultivated varieties
Albino Penis Envy
Psilocybe cubensis
A pale-pigmented offshoot of Penis Envy. Accounts of how the albino trait arose diverge: some credit a cross with an albino cubensis line stabilized by underground growers, another traces it to Robert McPherson crossing an Albino PF Classic with a Penis Envy line. No account is definitively confirmed — normal for this corner of strain history.
Amazonian
Psilocybe cubensis
One of the few varieties with a documented commercial lineage: isolated and sold by Pacifica Exotica Spora, a Hawaii-based spore vendor active in the early 2000s. Origin accounts describe a wild collection from a dung patty in the Amazon basin — Peru most commonly cited — brought back and commercialized by PES before the company wound down.
B+
Psilocybe cubensis
One of the most widely cultivated varieties, believed to have emerged in Florida in the 1980s or 90s. Its release is usually credited to a hobbyist known as Mr. G, though that attribution is anecdotal — typical of strain lore from the pre-internet spore-trading era. It spread during the online mycology boom for adaptability rather than any documented pedigree.
Blue Meanie
Psilocybe cubensis (name also applied to Panaeolus cyanescens — a different species)
A name worth untangling before anything else. Blue Meanie was historically the nickname for Panaeolus cyanescens, a separate dung-loving species. Believed to stem from a spore-vendor labelling mix-up in the 1980s, the name also attached to a Psilocybe cubensis variety, and both usages have circulated ever since. Most material sold as Blue Meanie today, and most lab-tested samples under the name, turn out to be cubensis.
Ecuador
Psilocybe cubensis
A highland variety said to derive from wild collections above 1,000 metres in the Ecuadorian Andes, where cool, humid conditions differ sharply from the lowland tropics most cubensis favours. Some accounts credit a mycologist known as BIO with preserving the line around 2000, but the chain of custody from wild collection to cultivated line is not independently documented.
Golden Teacher
Psilocybe cubensis
The best-known cubensis variety, circulating in North American spore-trading networks since roughly 1988. Its origin is undocumented folklore — the most repeated story places a wild source in Florida, but no verified collection or named isolator has ever been confirmed. The reputation for gentle, insight-heavy effects spread underground in the 1990s and stuck, making it the default reference point for the species.
Mazatapec
Psilocybe cubensis
Named for the Sierra Mazateca of Oaxaca, home to the Mazatec people and the ceremonial tradition that reached international attention after R. Gordon Wasson's 1957 account of a velada with curandera María Sabina. The variety sold under this name today is a hobbyist stabilization tied to that regional reputation — not a mushroom sourced from those ceremonies, and the direct chain of custody is undocumented.
Penis Envy
Psilocybe cubensis
The most distinctive and most mythologized cubensis line. The popular origin story credits Terence McKenna with collecting spores in the Colombian Amazon in the early 1970s, later cultivated by physician Steven Pollock, from which a grower isolated a stable mutant with swollen stems and undeveloped caps. Much of that narrative traces to a 2009 magazine article whose author later said he had been fed embellished details — so treat the story as folklore layered over a real underlying mutant line.
Tidal Wave
Psilocybe cubensis
A rarity in this space: a modern hybrid with a traceable history. A deliberate cross of B+ and Penis Envy made by cultivator Doma Nunzio somewhere between 2017 and 2020. Its towering potency reputation rests largely on a single 2021 Psilocybin Cup sample — a non-standard capless 'Enigma' mutation — that tested unusually high. Ordinary Tidal Wave fruit bodies test closer to other strong cubensis lines than to that outlier.
Z-Strain
Psilocybe cubensis
A fast-growing, high-yield variety that gained popularity in the early 2000s, reportedly stabilized in San Diego by underground growers. Attribution is genuinely murky: some sources wrongly credit mycologist Paul Stamets, while a more plausible but still unverified account says a cultivator known as The Keeper isolated the morphology out of a Golden Teacher batch.
Maverick Mushroom is an information directory. We do not sell anything, and a listing is not an endorsement of legality. Psilocybin laws vary by jurisdiction — verify your local laws.