hopinator

Recipes 

just for a baseline, I made a 1 gallon batch as follows.

1 - 1 gallon size Lipton tea bag, steeped in 1.5 qt 195 degree water for 10 min (just as i would for iced tea)
3 cups sugar boiled in 1 qt water
cooled all to 70 degrees, pitched 1/2 pack nottingham yeast i had

very slow ferment after 1 week, so pitched other half pack. no change. still fermenting very slowly after 6 weeks.

any thoughts, comments, suggestions would be appreciated.

I plan to do some further experiments, but as i said, just wanted a baseline to compare others to.

HokieBrewer

Recipes 

Will this be carbonated? Any plans to backsweeten it?

hopinator

Recipes 

will be consumed still, not carbonated. backsweetening to be determined, but probably. has been almost 7 weeks, still fermenting, not even starting to clear yet. that is the concern. as i said, this was just a cheap experiment only meant to serve as a baseline.

lrnardi

Recipes 

Are you trying to brew kombucha?

HokieBrewer

Recipes 

The fact he's fermenting with Nottingham ale yeast and not a mother culture leads be to believe - no.

hopinator

Recipes 

do not even know what kombucha is......

lrnardi

Recipes 

Sorry I missed the yeast in the ingredient list.
Hope that works for you!

Brewmasters Warehouse

Recipes 

Although I admittedly know nothing about fermented tea. I was just checking out this forum to find out a little bit about it. I think your issue is most likely with nutrients in the tea not being sufficient to get a proper fermentation. If you want to speed it up I would boil a very small amount of water with some yeast nutrient in there and pitch that into the tea. I think that would get the fermentation to finish quickly.

__________________
Brewmasters Warehouse

Purchase a recipe with Brew Builder and save 10% off the recipe. Use discount code: BBBYO

Become a fan of BMW on Facebook.

hopinator

Recipes 

thanks for the suggestion of yeast nutrient, had not thought of that previously. since my last post, fermentation seems to have finished. Final product is as I expected, very near panther pi$$. Now to figure out how to backsweeten/ make it drinkable.... maybe i will add it to regular sweet tea by the glass for a kick?? It is certainly not bad enough to dump, just very alcoholly (sp?)(real word??).... next batch will contain malt extract for sure. Thinking of maybe doing just a malt extract / crystal 60L wort, ferment it out, then add teabags as if making cold brewed tea??