Most aerated tea experts like Dr. Elaine Ingham from SoilFoodWeb.com, do not recommend brewing teas over 3-7 days of aeration, and also not brewing too much with lots of extra dry molasses in aerated teas when outside temps exceed 85 degrees F.
Most aerobic bacteria and fungi have an optimal temperature range and optimal watery tea solution envrinment, that they love for maximum survival and growth in aerated teas. Some microbes like drier environments. Some like wetter. Some like room temperature. Some can handler cooler or warmer temps. So based on the quality of your tea ingredients, your outside temperatures, and length of brewing, you can grow a wide variety of different types of bacteria and fungi.
In my experience, it is so easy to grow bacteria, aerobic or anaerobic. They live in almost all types of tea conditions, no matter what your temps are, or how bad your ingredients are. The only problem is that only all the aerobic bacteria smell good, and totally are beneficial for all composting, soil building, and disease control. Some of those smelly anaerobic are harmful or even deadly to other beneficial microbes, soil, or plants.
Fungi are all aerobic, and they are hardly to get it right in teas. They require more aerobic compost loaded with good aerobic microbes and macrobes, lots of aertion, and fungal foods like molasses, seaweed, fish, rotten fruit, or even good rich forest dirt to get more fungi breeding in the teas.
I wouldn't say that your long brewing smelly teas are so bad that they have no use in the garden or lawn. As a matter of fact, any level of organic matter or few aerobic microbes will eventually improve any soil type. The challenge is getting more of the good guys growing in the tea, real fast, real good.
One way to get better smelling tea is by using longer brewing times. However the 3-7 day limit is usually the limit where the microbes explode in growth so fast, that usually after that time limit, they start eating each other!
Another thing you can do is take the old compost and other stuff's remains out of the juice, and replace it with better compost or more fungal foods in the old juice, add more molasses, and aerate the tea again until it smells better. This will give you more aerobic microbes per gallon too.
Some people use 2 or more bubblers per bucket or tub of tea to get even more maximum aeration to the microbes per gallon in the tea.
If it is too hot outside, don't use so much or any sugar products in your tea brewing. The microbes will grow too fast, turning the tea temporarily anaerobic again.
Hope this helps some.
Happy Gardening!
_________________ The entire Kingdom of God can be totally explained as an Organic Garden (Mark 4:26)
William Cureton
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