Kombucha Brewing - Day 7
Today is Day 7, the day when all is revealed: The tasting of the KTs and the viewing of the scobys.
I first slid a straw down the wall of every jar and tasted the liquid. You can avoid contaminating the brews by using a clean straw each time, dipping it deep and putting your finger/thumb over the top so that it retains liquid in the straw when you lift it out, then taste your sample.
The taste contest was won by the green tea culture on the RIGHT: good acidity, with lovely tea aroma and still an edge of pleasant sweetness.
The LEFT and MIDDLE brews had already become too acidic for my taste. This is no disaster, but can work in your favour, as such acidic KT makes the most excellent starter for a new brew.
The milder tasting RIGHT jar KT will be bottled together with a whole host of other jars which just happen to have matured all on the same day.
As to the 3 scobys: I took them out of their jars and placed each upside down on a plate to take a picture. It's usually the underside which has ooglies attached and can look quite alarming to the uninitiated.
Only the MIDDLE scoby could be described as a thing of smooth beauty. The scobys of the LEFT and RIGHT brews each had a large squidgey oogly attached to the scoby. It looks quite bad on the pictures, but these yeast strands with brown/green tea-pigments came off very easily when I wriggled the culture in a strainer submersed in the KT. They really are quite harmless.
The MIDDLE brew scoby also easily won the thickness contest.
I believe that this plumper scoby would have had help from the mother scoby on the bottom of the jar giving off extra bacteria (the scoby builders) and helping to demolish the sugar in the brew faster, therefore the greater acidity.