Crucial; Temperature!

[Guest guest]

This is my first time posting and I would like to address a road block

I had with brewing.Tried to grow two babies, each from a bottle of

store bought GT kombucha in seperate gallon jars with sweet assam

tea.Put it in a cupboard in my kitchen, waited almost 2 weeks.

Guess what? No new scoby but a few mold lumps on the surface of the

tea. Damn. This time around I received 2 small thin scobys from

someone off a kombucha exchange network. I used a bottle of store

bought kombucha in each gallon jar again. However, this time I gave

careful attention to the AMBIENT TEMPERATURE the jars were in. I live

in SEATTLE and right now my house is near 60F. Not warm enough for kt

brewing I assumed so I went out and bought a " seedling heat mat " which

you should be able to find in most planting/gardening stores and

placed a towel on top of it and the jars on top of that. Then I

wrapped a towel around the base of both jars. I also used an external

fish tank thermometer that sticks like a piece of tape to the outside

of the jar (it has a range of 68-84F.) I made sure temp was in range

of 74-82F. About 12 days later, SUCCESS! A large scoby formed atop the

previous mini ones and am currently enjoying my first batch! This

might be a hasty conclusion but make sure to MAINTAIN IDEAL

TEMPERATURES WHEN BREWING KT! -