Hello Steemians,
Everything is bubbling along in the pickling room. Not much to report except some funkiness atop the kombucha, which I attribute to some SCOBYs which were fatigued from being unattended while we were on vacation. I took them out and put a little homemade vinegar in the jars to raise the pH. The taste was fine so I think they'll turn out alright.
I managed to get some good photos of the garlic brine change process which I'll share below:
Whoa! That's a decent head! I won't twist the cap on so tight next time.
The next series of photos is kind of special. I put my phone's camera up to the lens of my refractometer and they actually came out pretty good.
A refractometer is a device used to measure the specific gravity of a solution, in other words how much of something is dissolved in a liquid. Now, the problem is that you have to know the specific gravity of the starting liquid, (in this case distilled water SG=1.00) and you can only be looking for one solute. This is because what you're directly measuring with a refractometer is the liquid's refractive index, and anything that changes the refractive indeed will affect the reading. This basically means any dissolved solids. Now, I had the refractometer out to measure the salinity of the brine I was preparing, so I got a shot of the garlic brine after one week:
Yowza! That's 70 parts per thousand or 7.0% on the right. That would be super salty but I actually only used a 3.5% brine so that means the other 3.5% is coming from little dissolved bits of garlic.
Here is the prepared brine's reading. 3.3% or 0.2% too low.
7.6 grams of salt (or 0.2% of the weight of a gallon of water) later we have a perfect 3.5% brine. Now I'll just dump out the old brine and fill the jars back up!
Also, for those who have been wondering, there hasn't been a farty smell at all with this batch. There has been a garlic smell, though! Although, typing this up in the other room I can't smell anything at the moment.
Well, that's it for this update! Tune in next week and keep your questions and comments coming!
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