Man this stuff smells terrible. I just wanted to show you guys a pic of my brewer in action. I am using worm castings, alaskan fish emulsion
,High N bat guano and molasses.
View attachment 1015437
This is my first batch. Should I be brewing with the lid on or off by the way?
I suggest replacing the fish emulsion (cooked process) with a fish hydrolysate (cold process):
Taken from
Fish hydrolysate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - "If fish hydrolysate is heated, the oils and certain proteins can be more easily removed to be sold in purified forms. The complex protein,
carbohydrate and
fats in the fish material are denatured, which means they are broken down into less complex foods. Over-heating can result in destruction of the material as a food to grow beneficial organisms. Once the oils are removed and proteins denatured and simplified by the heating process, this material is called a
fish emulsion."
As an example, Alaska Fish Fertilizer 5-1-1 is actually an emulsion which recently lost its OMRI rating. A properly prepared AACT tea should smell like fresh earth. If not, bacteria have gone anaerobic.
Lid off or on depends on the capacity of your air pump and keeping the tea in the bucket.
Ideal airflow for a typical consumer level five gallon AACT brewer has been established (by experts in the scientific field) at .4 CFPM (cubic feet per minute) of air per gallon of water. Most air pumps are rated for aquariums in liters per minute (LPM). The conversion factor from LPM to CFPM is one LPM = .0135 CFPM (rounded). My pump is rated at 70 LPM, which converts to 2.47 CFPM. Divided by the four gallons of liquid in my five gallon bucket, that's .62 CFPM and yes, it was pushing liquid way out of the bucket.
I necked down the 3/8" (.375") air pump outlet to 1/4" (.250") using an aquarium manifold and a 1/4" line from that manifold to a 1/4" reducer feeding the 1/2" PVC manifold in the bucket. Mathematically my air flow into the bucket is now .41 CFPM/gallon of water. Pictures in another thread.
(we should all thank a lot of effort by many talented people who developed and made this information available)
on edit: Clean
all components used for brewing with something serious after every use! I let mine soak in the brew bucket in a 10% bleach to water solution for 24hrs after each use.
