Brick Cap Identification Guide

First Impression and Setting

Late autumn, sometimes after the first frosts have taken most other mushrooms, and a broadleaf woodland or an old parkland stump is carrying a dense mound of warm-coloured caps. From a distance the colour is what reads: a rich brick-red or tile-red centre fading to tawny, buff or almost cream at the edges, so a big cluster looks like a bank of terracotta tiles.

Get closer and the growth habit is the next character. Fruiting bodies emerge in tight, crowded, tufted clusters, often dozens together, with the stipe bases converging and sometimes fused. They arise from hardwood stumps, from buried roots, from the cut ends of logs and from the sawn faces of felled trunks, and clusters can be so dense that caps deform each other into irregular shapes.

Season and substrate together do a lot of work here: a big clustered mushroom on broadleaf wood in late autumn, brick-coloured with a pale margin, is already a short list.

Reading the Cap

Caps are four to ten centimetres across, occasionally larger, strongly convex to hemispherical when young and expanding to broadly convex or almost flat with a low umbo. The margin stays incurved for a long time.

Colour is the key visual: brick-red, tile-red, rusty orange or brownish-red over the disc, grading outward to tawny, ochre-buff and finally pale cream or nearly whitish at the extreme edge. That two-tone gradient, dark centre and pale rim, is consistent and is more reliable than any single colour name.

The surface is dry to slightly tacky when wet, smooth and bald over the centre. Look at the margin with a lens: on young caps there are whitish, cottony veil remnants hanging in small patches or fibrils along the edge, remains of a cortina-like partial veil. These often wear away, but on fresh clusters at least some caps will show them.

The Gills

Turn a cap over. The gills are adnate to slightly notched or narrowly attached, crowded, and moderately broad. Their colour sequence is one of the best characters in this guide, so read it across several ages of cap in the same cluster.

Very young gills are pale, whitish to cream or with a faint yellowish or greenish-buff cast. Middle-aged gills go grey, greyish-olive or smoky. Mature gills are dark purple-brown to greyish-purple, often with a slightly mottled appearance and with paler edges. Crucially, the mature tone is a violet-tinged brown, not a rusty orange-brown and not a pure sooty black.

Stipe, Base and Flesh

Stipes are five to ten centimetres tall and up to about a centimetre and a half thick, cylindrical, often curved and leaning because of the crowding, and typically tapering toward the base where they converge with their neighbours.

Colour is graded: whitish to pale yellow at the apex, becoming ochre, tawny and finally rusty brown to reddish-brown toward the base. The surface is silky-fibrillose, sometimes with fine fibrous scales below.

There is no true membranous ring, but there is often a faint ring zone where the cortina has collapsed, and on maturing specimens that zone darkens as spores are caught in it, becoming a diffuse brownish band.

Dig the cluster out rather than snapping it. The bases should lead down to wood, either a stump, a buried root or a chunk of decaying trunk. If the bases lead only to soil with no wood anywhere, reconsider.

Cut a fruiting body lengthwise. The flesh is firm, whitish to pale yellow in the cap, becoming brownish in the lower stipe, and it does not change colour appreciably on exposure beyond a slow dulling.

Taking a Spore Print

This is where the identification is confirmed, and it is quick because the species drops heavily. Cut the stipe off a fully expanded cap whose gills have started to darken, set the cap gill-side-down on white paper, cover it with a bowl and leave it three to six hours, or overnight for a thick deposit.

The print is dark purple-brown to chocolate-purple. Compare it against a clean white background in daylight and, if you can, alongside a scraping of rusty-brown material for contrast, because the violet component is easiest to see comparatively. A rusty or cinnamon deposit rules this species out entirely, as does a white one.

In dense clusters, spores falling from upper caps dust the caps and stipes below, so a purplish-brown film on the shoulders of lower fruiting bodies is a useful in-place substitute when you cannot wait for a print.

Substrate, Season and Ecology

Hypholoma lateritium is a saprotroph, decaying dead broadleaf wood and causing a white rot. Oak and beech are frequent hosts, along with birch, hornbeam, poplar and many other hardwoods. It fruits on stumps, on cut log ends, from buried roots in lawns and rides, and on fallen trunks, and the same stump usually produces for several consecutive years until the wood is exhausted.

The fruiting season is autumn and runs late, commonly continuing after frosts have finished off softer fungi, which is one reason clusters can be so conspicuous in a November wood.

Separating It From Look-alikes on Morphology

Hypholoma fasciculare. The commonest confusion because it clusters on wood in the same places at the same time. It is smaller and slimmer, sulphur-yellow to greenish-yellow overall with at most a tawny centre rather than a brick-red one, and its young gills are distinctly sulphur-yellow to yellow-green before turning purple-brown. Cap colour and young gill colour separate them without ambiguity.

Hypholoma capnoides. Similar stature, but it fruits on conifer wood, its cap is a duller ochre to tawny-orange without the strong brick tone or the pale fringed rim, and its young gills are whitish then distinctly smoky grey before darkening. Substrate plus young gill colour is decisive.

Pholiota species. Cluster on hardwood too, but most have viscid or conspicuously scaly caps, gills that mature to rusty cinnamon rather than purple-brown, and a rusty-brown spore print. Many have a more distinct ring.

Armillaria species. Also cluster on and around hardwood stumps in autumn, but the caps are honey to tan with fine dark fibrillose scales, there is usually a persistent membranous ring, the gills are whitish to pale cream ageing pinkish or spotted, and the spore print is white.

Gymnopilus species. Bright orange to rusty caps, often on wood, with gills maturing bright rusty orange and a rusty-orange spore print, plus a much more fibrillose and often scaly cap surface.

Galerina marginata. Much smaller and slimmer, growing in smaller groups rather than huge dense tufts, with a hygrophanous tawny cap that is not brick-red at the centre, a distinct membranous ring on a slender stipe, rusty-brown gills and a rusty-brown spore print. The print colour alone separates it from the Brick Cap.

Quick Field Checklist

Dense clusters on hardwood stumps, cut ends and buried roots; brick-red disc grading to pale cream margin; whitish cottony veil fibrils on young cap edges; gills whitish then grey then purple-brown; stipe pale above, rusty below, with a faint ring zone; dark purple-brown spore print; late autumn, often after frost.