Dave Claassen & Paul Grzybowski

Dave Claassen and Paul Grzybowski sell mushroom extracts out of Atlanta and run the mushroom festival that grew out of the business.

The two of them came on the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast through the Atlanta Mushroom Festival, which they put on, and the conversation took about a minute to find the Carpathians. Brad's father was from the Kentucky mountains and the family before that from the Carpathian range, and they hunted mushrooms and sauteed them with onions. Brad is colorblind, so his father would not let him do the picking. Grzybowski imports truffles from Romania and rattled off what else comes out of that range, porcinis and chanterelles and morels.

Their company is Encapsulate USA. Claassen spent about thirteen years in music at BMI and met Grzybowski after a lunch with Grzybowski's girlfriend at the time, who thought they would get along. Grzybowski has a chemistry background and built the blends. The argument they make is about what is in the capsule. Most competing products are grown on grain and sold as mycelium, and Grzybowski says the grain never fully breaks down, so a customer is mostly buying rice. Theirs is an extract. The fruiting bodies get ground, pulled with water for the beta glucans and with ethanol for everything that will not dissolve in water, then evaporated down to an ultra fine powder with the chitin and the starch left behind. The bottle carries 8,000 milligrams: 2,000 each of lion's mane and shiitake, and 1,000 each of chaga, reishi, turkey tail and cordyceps. They source through the largest extract manufacturer in North America and test for heavy metals and microbials.

The company exists because of one phone call. A close friend of Claassen's from the film world in Florida rang him and said his wife Lynn started chemotherapy and radiation in two weeks and he did not want to lose her. Claassen called Grzybowski, they sourced the product in three days and shipped it, and 58 days later the friend called to say Lynn was in remission. Claassen has his own reasons for caring about the subject. He lost his father to prostate cancer eighteen years ago, and he has come through more than twenty car accidents and twenty concussions, which is how he found hyperbaric oxygen therapy and then juicing. The festival has cost them too. They ran it quarterly for the first few years and burned out both themselves and their audience, and they have never taken a dollar out of it.

The festival sits at Lee and White in the West End, ten dollars to park and free to walk into, with speakers from half past twelve until seven and music alongside. Grzybowski will tell anyone that most mushroom festivals in America are a room full of wealthy older white people, and that theirs is the most diverse one in the world, which he puts down to who gets invited rather than who gets pushed out. Claassen's father was a minister, a teacher and a rugby coach at UGA, and what Claassen says he took from him was bringing people together. The only thing Grzybowski has ever taken home from the festival is a t-shirt.