first attempt at Hard Tea

[hopinator]

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]

Will this be carbonated? Any plans to backsweeten it?

 

[hopinator]

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]

Are you trying to brew kombucha?

 

[HokieBrewer]

Are you trying to brew kombucha?

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

 

[hopinator]

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

 

[lrnardi]

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

 

[Brewmasters Warehouse]

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.

 

[hopinator]

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??