I've read several places where they say you ahould never drink alcohol when you eat morels but they dont say why. I had never heard this before. Does anybody know? I love a cold beer with a big plate of fried morels!

Someone is pulling your leg. Cold beer, sizzling ribeye, fried mushrooms, and asparagus. This is the meal we always fix with our first mess of the year. Lots of cold beer.

You definitely caught my attention with that title! Some mushrooms can affect people differently when consumed with alcohol. I have not had problems with mixing morels and alcohol myself but that can vary with the person. I know one guy who is allergic to morels. Some mushrooms don't agree with people at all and others can eat them all day long. It is the same way with alcohol and some shrooms, some have issues mixing others do not. The best bet if you are unsure is small doses of mixing at first to see if you have a reaction or not. I am by no means an expert though and hopefully someone with a little more insight will correct me if I am wrong.

That is a common morel myth.
Consuming alcohol with morels is no more dangerous than consuming alcohol without morels.
I've never had a problem with it, and no one I know has ever had a problem with it.
I have not seen any scientific evidence to support that myth.

I have heard the same thing about booze, but don't know for sure either way. Might be a problem with blacks since they
are a little stronger. Everyones stomach has a different reaction to various foods.

Contact Michael Beug...the leading mushroom toxicologist in North America.

His data indicates that Morels have a fairly high rate of reaction among healthy adults (16%) and
this effect was exacerbated when the morels were black morels and consumed with alcohol.

James Groves also published about this topic in Mycologia.

J. Walton Groves. Poisoning by Morels When Taken with Alcohol. Mycologia, Vol. 56, No. 5 (Sep. - Oct., 1964), pp. 779-780


The effects from morel toxicity when paired with alcohol arent life threatening in most cases, vomiting and diahrea...but it is a very real phenomena.

For the record I generally consume morels with beer or wine myself and experience no side effects.

Glad I don't drink....LOL

Funny how it is the black morels. The reason I say this is because I have noticed that if I eat a large quantity of blacks about an hour later I get this numbing/tingling sensation at the tip of my tounge and no alcoholic beverages were consumed.This will usually last the rest of the day if eaten in the evening and even into the next morning. I never have had this happen with yellows/greys. This just started happening in past two years.

Looks like you may have to give up eatting black morels Mike.....you can always send them to me....j/k bro...

There does seem to be evidence to support that a small percentage of people will have a reaction to black morels, but I think these people would have had that reaction even if they didn't drink alcohol.

I've only met one person ever who claimed they felt bad after eating black morels.

In any case, the worst scenario seems to be a bad stomach ache. No one has ever died from eating morels or morels + alcohol. I don't think people should be overly concerned with it.