Ian Triplett had no idea mushrooms were on the verge of stardom when he bought his first mycological grow kit in 2015. In fact, he didn’t even have a taste for fungi back then. He simply wanted to try his hand at cultivating something new and different alongside his family’s viticulture operation in Leesburg. After serving in the Marine Corps and earning a degree in economics from Longwood University, he had a day job in banking. But he missed getting his hands dirty.
“I grew up in agriculture. I’ve always liked to grow things,” says the owner of Three Cap Farms, a popular vendor at the Saturday morning EatLoco farmers market in National Landing. “I always had a little garden—even at university. In this case I just fell in love with the process.”
Little did Triplett know his umami-rich crops would become an “it” food, expanding beyond the produce aisle and finding their way into snack food seasonings, homeopathic remedies, biodegradable packaging, a 2019 Netflix documentary and even home décor. In 2022, The New York Times declared mushrooms the “ingredient of the year.”
As demand for the product, uh, mushroomed, so did Triplett’s business. “I have increased production by 100% every year since I started Three Cap Farms in 2020,” he says. “Now I’m at the point where that’s not so easy.”
Today, he harvests roughly 160 pounds of gourmet mushrooms per week, selling them for $26-$28 per pound, with offerings that change seasonally. Early spring’s bounty included lion’s mane—“a scary, puffy brain-looking thing that tastes like crabmeat,” he says—along with pink oyster, Hamilton oyster (a variety indigenous to Loudoun County) and his current personal favorite, pioppino.
About that last one: “It has a classic look with a thin stem and a velvet brown parasol cap,” he says. “The flavor profile is unique and hard to peg with one adjective. It’s a sort of woodsy-meets-bittersweet-nutmeg-cacao kind of thing. I like to pair it with heartier dishes like red meat proteins or anything Italian.”
For scalability, he grows only four types of mushrooms at a time, on average, using a proprietary substrate that combines hardwood sawdust from Appalachian woodlands with wheat bran, gypsum, water and black oil sunflower seeds. “The plant-based fat content is pretty high,” he says of his growing medium. “It’s nice and nutritional for the mycelium to eat.”
For the record, Triplett doesn’t grow or sell psychedelic shrooms (he’s not that kind of mushroom man), though for fun he has been experimenting with a species of Cordyceps, the so-called “zombie fungus” made famous in the videogame-turned HBO drama series The Last of Us. Unlike the fictional fungus in the show, the real-world Cordyceps isn’t a human killer. On the contrary, it has purported medicinal properties that make it a hot commodity.
“I’m playing around just to see if I can get it to grow,” Triplett says. “In Asia it’s considered a delicacy. An ounce, dried, goes for $70. That blows truffles out of the water in terms of return on investment.”