Weak SCOBYs

[Guest guest]

Hmmm. A very generous person on this list sent me some scoby babies this week

and today I put two of them into qt jars of tea with 8 oz of starter ahd 1/3 c

sugar. I have put these on a different floor of the house I live in now - My

Dad's because I am taking care of him. It is hard to find the most peaceful

place because we have so many windows open and we live right on a major highway.

So we have lots of traffic noise. The only REAL quiet place I could have chosen

would be the basement or the attic. But they are not the cleanest because we

burn coal in the basement and I have NOT gotten to cleaning out the attic much

yet. So I picked a shelf in a closet and hung a towel over the shelves to help

muffle sound that the closed door would not filter.

I say this because my brew that I left in my unoccupied house is becoming quite

an experiment to me. That 9 wk old brew had leaked when I went there in April

and I thought I had cleaned it up sufficiently. (That was my winner of a taste.

But I did not have much to taste because so much had leaked out because of the

new faucet I had installed but not tightened down hard enough.) Earlier this

month when I went down again, there were no new leaks, but there were definitely

leftover puddles of old booch " behind things " when I took the time to clean

really good. The thing I noticed is, I have NO fruit flies in that house. Not

one! Evidently it is not booch that they smell and come into your house to get.

You bring them in some other way. I'm gonna start washing my fruits and veggies

before I bring them into the house to see if I can get this FF problem gone.

So I think I will empty that closet and take my CB crocks up into that same

closet with the two new quarts I started.

Additionally, I tasted one of my two filled CB crocks yesterday and it should be

fermented and it wasn't. So today I took the cover off to replace all the scobys

with scobys from my very acidic hotel. When I took the top off and reached

innnnn...I saw bubbles all around half of the top! That's the first time I have

seen bubbles in -- forever! Not since I gave my neighbor a scoby and HIS got

bubbles the first brew.

I am puzzled. How can there be bubbles on top when there was no carbonation when

I decanted some yesterday to taste it and when it was obviously not fermented? I

am replacing scobys because I have played around with these for too long and I

feel they are just shot out by now.

I am really puzzled by this KT.

Lyn