The short answer
Penis Envy and Golden Teacher are both Psilocybe cubensis, so their spores look the same under the microscope: dark purple-brown in mass, smooth, subellipsoid and thick-walled, with a germ pore at one end. The differences are in the fruit body and the print. Golden Teacher has the textbook cubensis shape, with a golden-brown cap that opens out, a ring on the stem and a dense, dark print. Penis Envy is a mutation line with a thick, pale stem, a small cap that stays closed around it, and a print so sparse that many fruit bodies drop almost nothing.
That one trait shapes how the two are sold. Golden Teacher turns up as prints, swabs and multispore syringes from most cubensis vendors. Penis Envy is listed mostly as isolate syringes, liquid cultures and research plates, and its prints are scarce.
Where the names come from
Both histories are hobby folklore. Neither strain has a published pedigree, so treat what follows as the stories collectors and vendors repeat rather than documented fact.
Penis Envy
The most repeated account credits Terence McKenna with collecting the original material in the Amazon and Steven Pollock with isolating the line from it. Neither step has been documented, and vendors do not agree on the details: Sporeworks, one of the longest-standing sources for the line, simply gives the strain origin as "Colombia, South America". The name is a joke on the shape, borrowed from Freud. Sonoran Spores explains it plainly, describing "large thick stems and very rounded caps with veils that often do not tear completely".
Golden Teacher
Golden Teacher is usually said to have been in circulation since the 1980s, and a Florida collection is sometimes mentioned as its source. Sporeworks lists its origin as "Unknown", and Fungus Frequency describes it as "considered one of the earliest cubensis varieties to be documented". The "Golden" half of the name describes the cap colour. The "Teacher" half has no documented explanation at all.
What each one looks like
The fullest descriptions on Culture Cave come from Sporeworks, which publishes a field-guide style entry for each strain.
- Cap. Golden Teacher: "reddish cinnamon brown maturing to golden brown to light yellow", convex at first and flattening with age, with veil remnants spotting the surface. Penis Envy: bell-shaped, golden brown to yellow, without the spots, and slow to open or never opening fully.
- Stem. Golden Teacher: long and yellowish, bruising bluish green where handled. Penis Envy: long, thick and "contorted often bulbous near the middle", pale yellow to buff.
- Ring. Golden Teacher keeps a membranous ring that becomes "dusted with purple brown spores at maturity". The original Penis Envy lacks that ring, and its veil often stays partly closed over the gills.
- Gills and print. Golden Teacher gills go from greyish to nearly black, and the print is heavy and dark purplish brown. Penis Envy gills are poorly exposed and the print is light.
Why Penis Envy prints are sparse
The cap does not develop properly. Sporeworks writes that Penis Envy caps "do not develop normally and suffer diminished spore production", adding that "only 10-25% of the mushrooms produced visible spore prints" and that "spores are difficult to acquire in volume". A cap that stays clamped round the stem, under a veil that will not tear, exposes very little gill surface, so few spores ever reach the paper.
The spores that do form are ordinary cubensis spores. Put a Penis Envy print and a Golden Teacher print under the same objective and you will struggle to tell individual spores apart; the difference is density. In practice, a Penis Envy swab or print can look faint, a field of view holds fewer spores, and most Penis Envy listings are isolates and cultures rather than prints. The guide to spore prints and swabs explains what each format actually holds.
The Penis Envy sub-lines on Culture Cave
Penis Envy has been selected and re-selected for decades, so the name now covers a family. The labels below are the ones vendors on Culture Cave use, and the descriptions are theirs. If the numbering and tags are new to you, the post on how to read a strain name decodes them.
PE6 is listed by Dino Spores as an isolated syringe and by Sporeworks as a multispore syringe. Sporeworks describes Penis Envy #6 as a hybrid of the original Penis Envy and a Texas Gulf Coast strain, credited to the hobbyist RogerRabbit, with a bell-shaped cap that "never fully expands even at maturity". PE7, "Penis Envy #7", is listed by Dino Spores as syringes and swabs and by TecheGenetics as an isolate.
Penis Envy Uncut is, in Sporeworks' words, its "first lab created strain", a hybrid of Penis Envy and PF Albino. "Uncut" refers to the membranous ring that the original Penis Envy lacks. Dino Spores calls it one of the sister cultures from the original APE project by the breeder Workman, with pigmented fruit bodies "that darken significantly as they reach maturity".
Albino Penis Envy (APE) comes from the same pairing, Penis Envy x PF Albino, and is the white member of the family. Sporeworks lists its spores as "few, transparent", so APE is doubly hard to see: sparse and colourless. It is the most widely listed line in the group, from Purple Mountain Inoculation, Sonoran Spores, Fungus Frequency and Sporeworks, with Dino Spores carrying several named APE isolations. The albino and leucistic explainer covers why its syringes can look empty.
Melmak, which Sporeworks calls "the original homestead PE variety Melmac" and credits to Michael Montgomery, is described by Dino Spores as "a PE lineage isolation" with large fruit bodies. Fungus Frequency lists its own Melmak isolations with long, dense stems and "mostly closed caps". The line now has its own family of crosses, mapped in the Mak and Melmak post.
Three labels say where a culture came from rather than how it looks. OG Penis Envy, from Dino Spores and Black Forest Cultures, uses the OG tag to claim descent from the original line. SW Penis Envy is Dino Spores' "classic Penis Envy lineage sourced from the legends at Sporeworks", SW being Sporeworks. ODPE, which Dino Spores spells out as "Old Dirty Penis Envy", is listed by Fungus Frequency as "a specific phenotype isolation of PE".
The Golden Teacher sub-lines on Culture Cave
Golden Teacher has been passed around as multispore prints for so long that many slightly different lines are sold under the one name. A few have been picked out and named.
True Albino Teacher (TAT) is the best known. Sporeworks says it appeared in 2018, "isolated from a Golden Teacher multispore experiment by mycologist Jik Fibs", and lists its spores as "white in deposit". Summer Breeze Mycology, which also lists it, describes its albino appearance and blushing blue gills. TAT is a parent of much of the modern albino scene, including Jack Frost (usually given as TAT x APE) and several of the lines in the Gates family.
Leucistic Golden Teacher (LGT) is the halfway form: pale caps, but spores that keep their colour, so the print is still purple-brown. Because "albino" and "leucistic" are used loosely, read any LGT or albino Teacher label for the print colour before you buy.
Cascadian Teacher is listed by TecheGenetics as a swab set, and Golden Halo by Mr Rogers Labz as a swab set it describes only as a classic. Neither vendor gives a pedigree, so the Teacher and the Golden in those names are labels rather than a proven link to Golden Teacher. Texas Goldies, from Fungus Frequency, is the same caution in reverse: the vendor calls it a "wild Texas variety", so it shares the gold in its name and, as far as any listing says, nothing else.
Which vendors list them
Golden Teacher is the wider of the two. Purple Mountain Inoculation, Dino Spores, Sonoran Spores, TecheGenetics, Fungus Frequency and Sporeworks list it between them, as prints, swabs, multispore and isolate syringes, liquid cultures and research plates. Penis Envy itself is listed by Purple Mountain Inoculation, Fungus Frequency, Sonoran Spores and Sporeworks, while Dino Spores carries most of the named sub-lines.
Which to put under the microscope first
For a first slide, Golden Teacher is the easier subject: a heavy print, plenty of spores in every field, and endless reference images to compare against. Penis Envy makes more sense as a second slide, prepared the same way, so you can see for yourself that the spores match and only the quantity differs. The guide to using a spore syringe for microscopy covers preparing both.
Psilocybe and Panaeolus spores on Culture Cave are sold for microscopy and taxonomy use only, and buyers must know their local law before ordering; see whether mushroom spores are legal in the UK or in the USA.