We’re trying a black tea called Golden Monkey from DavidsTea in place of our usual Darjeeling. e brought 6 cups of water to boil in a pot, removed it from heat, added 28 grams of tea and steeped for 4 minutes covered (oops, actually I lost track of time so it steeped a good bit longer), stirring midway through. We then added 1 1/4 cup of sugar to a gallon jar and strained the tea into it, dissolving the sugar. We added 5 cups of water and let cool to room temperature. Next we added 1 1/2 cups of starter tea and transferred the SCOBY. We’ll let it ferment for seven days before bottling.

We harvested this on 10/29. It was very dark but tasted good. It was “vinegary” (Babs word for strong) but still sweet. We bottled #51-54 with 1/4 cup of WF concord grape juice and 1 tsp of sugar and we made one plain bottle of plain, #55.

Well shit! I accidentally moved #55 to the fridge on 11/1. I am realizing it now after about 6 hours. It is cold. So I’m moving it back to the shelf. This will be a good experiment to see what happens when a second fermentation is interrupted by a short refrigeration.