Hunting Chaga Mushroom and Making Chaga Tea

Hello there, welcome back. In this video Colin and myself are in a wood in Northumberland and today we're on another fungus hunt but we're looking for one specific fungus and that fungus is chaga. Did we find any when we were out? Would it be worth making a video if we didn't find any? Watch on and find out. So I suppose I better show you what we're actually looking for when we're looking for chaga out in these woods. That's it there. It's a very small lump, and that was actually given to me by Colin, who I go mushroom hunting with. It's got like a yellowy, orangey, browny inside, and a hard crust, hard black crust on the outside. It almost looks like a lump of obsidian. The idea is that you break this up, and you make a tea from it. So that's what we're looking for when we're out in the woods. Decent amount, that, like. That's pretty good, that's got to weigh... A kilo? A kilo, yeah. Well we have found some chaga. That's a lump up there just in the middle of the shot. There you go. That's a pretty good lump on that knackered silver birch. It's very high off the ground though. We'll kind of get up there without any ladders. And up this one there's a little bit more chaga starting just up here. It's not the best of shots. It's pretty much just in silhouette. That's it just bursting out the left hand side of the tree there. But again that's a little bit too high to be able to climb up safely. Here's a fallen silver birch with some beautiful tinder fungus on. Decent sort of size, absolutely covered with them, excellent. So that's what we've got just off this one fallen piece of silver birch, and they're just the decent bits, there's obviously still a hell of a lot more little ones left. What we'll do with these, I'll give some away in upcoming giveaways for my bushcraft viewers. Colin will take some and he'll give them away to the lads in the Viking reenactment club that he's a member of. Look at this, we've got a big silver birch here. With two trunks going up and we've got a little scotch tree growing in the middle. What a bleak existence it must be in there. You know its roots are all confined in this tiny little space and it's relying on water running down here to keep it watered. And yet it's still alive. Absolutely amazing. We just spotted an absolutely gigantic one right in the top of the tree. Check that out. That's absolutely massive, all the way around the tree just totally bursting out. The tree's about knackered it and really we could chop the tree down to get that but as it is that's just too high to climb up. It's hopefully a little bit of a steadier shot. I'm using my backup camera today and it's not very good as far as the shakes go but that is one meaty lump of chaga fungus. So that just shows you we're in Northumberland hunting today. And if you look for chaga distribution on a Google search, come up with all sorts of maps and graphs and reports of where it's found. I couldn't find one in Northumberland, but we found quite a lot just on this one property. And where we are today is actually one of the sites where I go metal detecting. It's a private piece of woodland, but chaga will be found in other bits of woodland around Northumberland. It has to be. This one does have a high percentage of silver birch in. which is what it grows on but um if you go out you're bound to find some. Ah it is, I made that a couple of years ago. Ah yeah it's standing up not too bad isn't it? That still looks pretty good. There you go that's been up two years. If you're interested in seeing me make that particular shelter I'll put the link in the video description. Got a big silver birch here, honeysuckle that's fallen off the side of it and in that honeysuckle woven in We've got a lovely little nest there made out of moss. It's a bit knackered now, but that would have been kind of like that, with a little hole in the front. And I'm thinking that's a long-tailed tit's nest. I get those breeding around my place, and they always make this beautiful little ball of moss. That's not actually grown on a tree. It's just a branch that's dropped off, isn't it? That's a canny one. We've got a likely-looking one down here, just around this corner. Please don't start it with it. Oh, get up there. Yep, that's what it is. And we've spotted that from, what, maybe it's 100 yards away? That's a good lump, that. Nice. Yes. That is good old-fashioned English chaga. That's a beautiful lump. Absolutely lovely. Colouring that's outstanding, isn't it? It's almost like iron oxide sort of colour. Horses We've got loads of horseshoof tinder fungus in there. And into there goes a huge lump of chaga. That's got to weigh the best part of a kilo, I would imagine. Yeah, that's two kilos a day. Yeah. Now, when I've been travelling around these various sites that are reasonably close to my home, you know, maybe it's up to 20 minutes away, it's become quite evident that there is a lot of chaga about. And I think why it's not really recorded as ever being found in this particular county is people simply don't look up. Most of it grows way up. And it's really only in the winter, when all the leaves are off the trees, that you can see it very, very easily. Once you know what you're looking for... It's all over the place. This has dried out for a good few days and I've actually been able to just crack some pieces off the top by hand. And that really does look like obsidian. It's black. That's basically the concentrated goodness from the sap that's in the birch tree. Now that's a great cross section through the chaga there and you can see how everything's been concentrated on the outside. It's almost like black glass. Now I've just broken some of that up really easily with a very cheap axe stroke hammer. and a screwdriver but you can break it up by wrapping it in an old tea towel and hitting it with a hammer that'll knock it into much smaller lumps i've seen that done in a video on chaga cannot remember whose it is but i definitely saw that in a video and it seemed to work very well it destroyed the tea towel but it did work so now there's numerous choices can either boil it up in big lumps Dry the lump out, then boil it again, dry it out, boil it again, again and again, until all the colour that would be coming out of it has stopped coming out of it. Or we can use it in the small lumps and repeat that process. Or we can powder it down into like a coarse grain and use that to make the tea. So no matter which way you do it, it does seem to work. There, just check that out. It's like really coarse coffee grains and you've got a beautifully rich mix of colours there. So we've got two different grades of chaga, we've got the smashed up lumps, and we've got the coarsely ground bits, and that actually broke my grinder, which is no surprise because it was a very cheap one, I just wanted to test the concept, and I wish I'd bought a good one because whilst it worked, it worked well, but I've actually bent it and smashed it. So we're going to add this into here, reduce the heat, simmer it for at least an hour and see what we'll get. Already that water's gone black. That actually smells a bit like ordinary tea, I'm not quite sure what I was expecting because I've never had this before, but it certainly doesn't smell of mushrooms. Now chaga has got a ridiculous amount of medicinal benefits, it's known as the king of the medicinal mushrooms. I'll put any relevant links to chaga, as far as the information about it and the medicinal benefits go, in the video description, check those out. I don't just want to regurgitate a big long list of things in this video. I say that all the time in videos, people just regurgitate and stuff. Just put a link in. Anybody who's interested enough, check it out. Actually, one thing I forgot to mention about Chaga is that it is a very good tinder fungus. I've never actually used it as a tinder fungus, but the oldest recorded Iceman, 5,000 years old, I think, was like an ice mummy. I think he was found in Siberia or certainly somewhere in the Arctic Circle. It was found to have a little pouch on him. With chaga in it, along with, I think there was flint in there as well, so it was like a little fire lighting kit. One day I will try it as a tinder fungus. Now if you've watched my previous videos, you may have seen me use one of those, which is the horse's hoof fungus. And that is also known as tinder fungus as well. That one is much more common. But like the chaga, it grows on birch trees. Actually this one, I have dropped a spark into there. You can see the little hole, the little crater in there. You just rough that up, drop a spark in and it smoulders and you can transfer that ember to light a fire. Just let this smoulder and you can carry it for miles. It really does smoulder for hours. Give it a bit of a blow and it goes into a lovely hot ember. So one day I'll use the chaga for the same purpose as this lighting fires. Right, it's been about an hour now. Maybe it's a bit more. That still doesn't really smell of fungi or anything. That is absolutely as black as the night is long. Check this out. That's like creosote. I think I've possibly put too much chaga in that pot. There's only about a litre of water there and that reduced by about a quarter so there's about 750 millilitres of water and really this this looks like birch tar. I think this maybe is a little bit too strong. So I'm not gonna have a full cup of this because it looks exceptionally oily. Actually tastes quite oily as well. Now the chaga that was in it. Looks like well done steak. Still really that doesn't have much of a flavour. Just poured the chaga concentrated tea into here and just take a look in here. I'll dry that out and that will boil up again and again and again, possibly for up to two to three weeks according to the crack. So you've seen how much very very concentrated chaga tea you can get just by brewing up one very small amount of this fungus. Just imagine how much you could get out of that. That's the one that me and Colin found on my detecting permission. And that is a really, really nice lump of chaga. Now because this is probably way more than I'll ever use, and I know where I can get more if I need it, I'm going to give some of this away. I'll probably cut this into lumps and I'll give it away in upcoming videos. So look out for them. It might be a week's time, it might be a month's time, it might be six months' time, I don't know. It'll be purely random as well, so I won't announce it, it'll probably just be on the end of one of my outdoor videos. So look out for that if you've ever wanted to drink chaga tea. Like most things that are apparently good for you, it does not taste nice, especially when it's cold. But I am going to have some every day, and I'll let you know if it has any sort of noticeable effect in an upcoming video. Thanks very much for watching, I'll see you in the next video. Now when I say this is a spooky wood... This is during the day. I haven't heard one bird song at all, even the crows when they fly over, they seem to be making a noise until they get to the wood and then they're just silent, then as soon as they get beyond the wood they start to make a noise again, it's like they almost tell each other to stop talking when they're above the wood, it's really really strange, even in the summer you just don't hear much at all in here. And yet it's got loads of fallen trees, there's a good diversity of trees, there's a good diversity of landscapes, there's a stream going through it, it's just a really, really strange place. I think it would be a good place to put some gamecams out just to see what, if anything, roams around here on a night, possibly Bigfoot.