Cordyceps
The fungus that grows out of insects. Here because you ask, not because we sell it.
Cordyceps is a group of fungi that grow out of insects. The fungus takes over a caterpillar or a moth larva and fruits as an orange club from the body. People ask us about it constantly. It is not in our coffee and this page is reference only.
What is cordyceps?
It is a genus with hundreds of species, and what unites them is the host. A cordyceps spore lands on an insect, the fungus grows through it, and in the end a fruiting body pushes out of the shell and stands up like a small club.
Two get talked about. Cordyceps militaris is the bright orange one, a finger-sized club that is grown commercially and is the one most powders are made from. Ophiocordyceps sinensis is the one from high on the Tibetan plateau, which fruits from ghost moth caterpillars and comes out of the ground looking like a twig with a caterpillar still attached at the bottom.
Where does cordyceps come from?
The Tibetan name is yartsa gunbu, which translates as summer grass, winter worm. It is a description of what people saw: a worm in the cold months and a blade of something plant-like in the warm ones, and for a long time nobody was sure which it really was.
It is gathered by hand, on the plateau, in a short season each year, by people bent over the ground looking for a stalk the width of a matchstick. It is one of the more remarkable harvests in food, and it is why cordyceps has a mystique that the cultivated orange version does not quite inherit.
What have researchers looked at?
We have not done the same depth of reading on cordyceps that we have done on lion's mane and chaga, and we are not going to pad this section to look as though we have.
There is an active human research literature on it. We have not read it end to end against the primary papers, and until we have, we are not going to summarise it for you, because a summary you cannot check is exactly what this section exists to avoid. When we do the reading, this page gets rewritten and dated, and everything above stands as biology and history in the meantime.
What is actually in cordyceps?
Like every fungus, its cell wall is built from beta-(1,3),(1,6)-D-glucans. Past that, several named compound families get quoted for cordyceps constantly, and we have not verified any of them against primary sources ourselves, so they are not printed here yet.
Why is this page here?
Because people ask. Cordyceps is not in our coffee, it has never been in a Fruiting Body product, and nothing on this page is a reason to buy anything. It is here so that the question has an honest answer on our site instead of somewhere worse.
These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
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