Recent content by ffmurray

from my first post I fermented it with the ginger solids for ~16 days before removing them I ended up with a very strong ginger flavor, with a similar profile to raw ginger, spicy. So what I was wondering is how the ginger flavor profile is compared to something that's pretty close to...

id be interested to know how cooking the ginger into the recipe works out as far as strength of ginger flavor, have you done the fermentation with raw ginger before?

slow reply: for the soda I never took any SG measurements so i just had the theoretical 8% or 9% and based off of taste and feel that seems pretty close. My wife and I have drank all of the ginger beer, and it turned out well. It is an experiment that I will certainly try again.

The bottles fully carbonated, and I opened one up last night. my wife and I shared it, it was just a little to sweet for my liking and we ended up putting a squeeze of lime into each glass, then it was delicious. It didn't taste alcoholic at all, but it sure was potent! For the next time i...

Ive noticed in several threads that people keep using hydrometers to try and determine if their ferment is done. While this works for beer and wine it does not work for kombucha. Kombucha is a very complicated thing, there are many different chemicals including alcohols and acids. If you...

Isn't orange pekoe just a grading for the size of the tea leaves? I fail to see how this would effect the kombucha when you were using orange pekoe grade black tea.

I bottle exclusively in flip top bottles, you can buy them by thee case, the lids never get lost, they are repairable, cant beat them.

never seen anything like it, pretty incredible, I think its safe as long as it doesn't grow arms and crawl out, you better keep it happy and well fed just in case it does manage to get out, might save you from a cruel fate....

1) how much sugar per gallon of tea are you using? 2) when it tastes watery, is it sweet or has it fermented most of the sugar out? If you have tried a new scoby and new starter tea then my guess is that it would have to do with your recipe. if you could post a detailed recipe it would be a...

yes :)

Ive been making some hard ginger beer, I had different plans from how it went, but I made a mistake early on and added way to much sugar. so I have kind of gone with it and we will see how it all turns out, I'm not going to try and stop fermentation after carbonation, even though there will be...

Most of the time the cultures and strains are visually identified. This is how it is done in a smaller lab most of the time. This is combined with gram staining and a few other tests. In larger labs the have some seriously fancy machines. Bit of you are still interested in plating PM me and I...

maybe infected... maybe scratch... regardless it seems like it would have the complete range of yeast and bacteria that form a good healthy SCOBY, but maybe it does... could be the new super scoby :)

Metal can ad off flavors to the kombucha and make the scoby week. I used to do contunius ferments in a glass crock, but I now do batch ferments. I like the batch fermenting process a lot better, I have not had any problems with contamination, and I dont have to deal with scoby clogging the...

plate it on agar, identify cultures, anything beyond that you are going a lot a bit to far IMHO but you should be A - OK if the the PH is below 3.7