Turkey Tail
Banded fans on dead hardwood. Here because you ask, not because we sell it.
Turkey tail, Trametes versicolor, is the banded fan you have walked past a hundred times. It grows in overlapping shelves on dead hardwood, in rings of brown, grey and rust. People ask us about it. It is not in our coffee and this page is reference only.
What is turkey tail?
Thin, leathery, semicircular fans, each one about the size of a bottle cap up to about the size of your palm, growing in tiers and rosettes along fallen logs and old stumps. The top is banded in concentric rings, brown and grey and rust and sometimes a faint blue-green, which is where the name comes from. Versicolor means many-coloured and it is earned.
The underside is the identification. It is covered in tiny pores rather than gills, and a proper turkey tail has a lot of them, packed fine enough that the surface reads as white and slightly velvety to the eye.
Where does turkey tail come from?
Nowhere in particular, which is the fun of it. It is one of the most widely distributed mushrooms in the world and it grows on dead hardwood on every continent that has trees. If you have walked in woodland in autumn, you have almost certainly seen it and filed it as bark.
Japan calls it kawaratake, which means the mushroom by the riverbank, and in China it is yunzhi, the cloud mushroom, both names describing the banding rather than anything else about it.
What have researchers looked at?
We have not done the same depth of reading on turkey tail that we have done on lion's mane and chaga, and we are not going to fill this section out to look as though we have.
There is a substantial human research literature with turkey tail in it. We have not read it end to end against the primary papers, so we are not summarising it here. When we do the reading, this page gets rewritten and dated. Everything above is biology and history.
What is actually in turkey tail?
Its cell wall is built from beta-(1,3),(1,6)-D-glucans, as every fungal cell wall is. Turkey tail is also the source of two named polysaccharide preparations that get quoted a great deal, and we have not verified the chemistry against primary sources ourselves, so it is not printed here yet.
Why is this page here?
Because people ask. Turkey tail 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 because it is the mushroom you are most likely to actually meet, and that seemed worth writing down.
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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