Black Specks in Kombucha

[jshaffe1]

Hi, when preparing my 2nd fermentation, I noticed black specks that look a little like pepper (or possibly bits of black tea?) floating in the tea and on the scoby. I did not see these when originally pouring the tea though. Has anyone ever seen this? Could it be mold?

 

[GregP507]

It doesn't look like colonies of any organism. It looks like flakes of some sort of scale buildup from somewhere. Probably from the tea.

 

[Spaceman]

Looks like tea specks.

 

[jshaffe1]

Thanks! I think it is just the tea. I used loose-leaf black tea in a large tea ball and I think some specs got through. It's been a few days now and still looks the same.

 

[ericbw]

Looks like tea to me.

 

[telebrewer]

Looks like tea...

 

[Jim Nickel]

Thanks! I think it is just the tea. I used loose-leaf black tea in a large tea ball and I think some specs got through. It's been a few days now and still looks the same.

I think I have an answer to your black spec problem. I noticed some black specks like the ones in your picture floating in MY beer after I poured it into a glass. Mine were mostly square and rectangle shaped. THAT IS AN IMPORTANT THING TO NOTE. I just discovered last night what it likely was.

I do all-grain. My 10 gallon boil kettle has a cylindrical wire mesh screen on it that screws onto the inside of the ball valve so that my valve won't get clogged with hops and junk when I transfer it from the boil kettle to the fermenter. LAST NIGHT, I noticed that this screen had what looked to be rust on the INSIDE. It was not visible at all on the outside. I was able to use a can of compressed air to dislodge some of the brown particles (rust?). I then put the screen thing into a concentrated solution of CLR and left it go overnight. This morning, I saw LOTS of brown debris (rust?) and a few black square chunks. It looks as if the rust was starting to form where the edge of the cylinder mates up with the other edge, EVEN THOUGH IT'S STAINLESS STEEL. So, if you haven't looked recently, look to see if your ball valve screen (or whatever it's called) had brown and black stuff in it. The size of the black square specks in my beer were exactly the same size as the mesh in my screen. It all made sense after I thought about it. The bad news, is that I now have 3 batches that I'm sure will have these black specks in it. I'll have to filter it through multiple hop bags during racking and bottling to hopefully catch all of the black specks.

I uploaded 2 of the high res pictures of what I saw. If you zoom in really close, you can see that black specs are rectangular or square. Here is where I put them on dropbox. This forum won't allow me to upload such high res photos.

https://tinyurl.com/y892s92d

I'd really like to know if others had seen the same thing I'm reporting. Please post here.

Hi, when preparing my 2nd fermentation, I noticed black specks that look a little like pepper (or possibly bits of black tea?) floating in the tea and on the scoby. I did not see these when originally pouring the tea though. Has anyone ever seen this? Could it be mold?