kjell
commented
10 years ago Bottled about a week ago, forgot ti update. It's OK, but not my greatest effort. The tea was a bit strong and I'm still not sure when to pull the trigger and move it into bottles. Hopefully the next is better.
I'm going to go all in this time. Twice the tea.
2 x 30g satchetsoflaoshan black?.To get the hot sugary tea down to room temperature I tried something new: brew two
1.7L(that's how much water my electric kettle can boil) batches of tea, put half the sugar in each, then fill the rest with filtered water. When all the hot water and tea are brewed in the same vessel there isn't enough room left for cold water in the bowl. Chilling it in an ice bath is a pain. The fridge/freezer is slow.I added too much cold water however, so I had to dump 1/8 of the second container into the scoby hotel.
I drained off a lot more of the dregs from #6 because of how vinegary they are. The last batch got too strong too fast. I cleaned out my other big glass jar and started a 'scoby hotel'. Most of batch #6 went in there. I reserved the good stuff at the very bottom with all the brown bits (yeast?) in a glass bowl, cleaned out my spigot`ed jar, and dumped them back in.
I split the scoby in half and put the older, bottom half into the hotel. The top half will brew this batch. I'm headed out of town for the weekend so I'd rather it go slow than fast.
It's covered back up and tastes like sugary tea. I'm not sure about the flavor of this tea, but it will be fine. Next time I'm going back to cheap tea though, $15 for one batch is too steep.
The hardest part of the brewing process is lugging the full, refreshed jar back to where it sits in my room. From downstairs I can either walk directly up the stairs with two latching fire doors in my way or go the long way around for about 10x as much walking. The full jar is heavy, so pausing and balancing all the weight in one hand is a workout. It worked well to put the jar in a milk crate and use the handles on that to carry. I didn't spill anything, which is better than I did last time as it sloshed around in the jar.