30 July - Rooibos (& black tea) F1
I wasn't sure how much tannin there is in rooibos, so I threw in a little black tea as well.
This batch took a reeeeally long time to loose its sweetness.
When I make a side brew using non-tea teas, I take the starter liquid from my SCOBY hotel - a jar of spare pellicles and extra strong booch, which I top up with sweet tea periodically to keep it going.
But I think maybe I didn't feed it often enough? or it got too cold? and the culture went dormant. Because I've had a couple of side brews fail in a row now - and each time it slowly got more sour but never lost its sweetness.
20 Aug - Flavoured
Eventually I got tired of waiting for the rooibos batch to taste 'ready'. But instead of ditching the whole thing, I decided to flavour half of it, just to see if it would carbonate.
22 Aug - Bottled
And it did end up fizzing nicely, but it was definitely still too sweet. On the plus side, I learned that strawberry and cinnamon go perfectly with rooibos, so I'm putting that on the repeat list.
(And I took some starter liquid from my main brew, made a big batch of sweet tea, and added it to the SCOBY hotel - should hopefully bring it back to life)