#side brew

This time I'm going with hibiscus. Its probably one of the most popular non-tea choices for the primary fermentation, but this is the first time I'm trying it.

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.