Patiently getting better (day 156)

Bacterial update:  It was a good day for the scoby love.  Two things happened.  Steve and I went to the TenRen tea shop in Chinatown and I was able to taste a 10 year old Pu-Erh tea.  It was delicious, smooth, sweet, and interesting.  The woman serving us had asked if I wanted to taste the 10 or 20 year old tea.  I decided on the 10 year old because I didn't think I wanted to spend the money on the 20 year old tea which was more than twice as much.  But I became curious after tasting the 10 year old tea.  I asked her what the difference is and she said it's sweeter and more complex.  After some discussion I purchased the 20 year old tea and got the 10 year old for free.  Who knows if it was a good deal.  Bargaining is not a skill widely practiced in my usual circles.   I got home and immediately brewed a cup of the 20 year old tea.  It was as she described: a beautiful, smooth, complex taste of autumn in my mouth.  It may now be my favourite tea.
The second thing that happened is that I did a final pH test on the kombucha that had been brewing for  three weeks and it was at 3.3 which meant that it was ready for bottling - a minor miracle!   Sometimes delays are forced patience for the good things in life.  So I sterilized everything and bottled the kombucha.  I filled six of the Grolsch bottles.  They will now rest comfortably at room temperature for two days to promote carbonation.  I'm not sure how much carbonation I'll get since it doesn't taste very sweet at this point.  I thought about adding sugar but decided against it in the end. 
I brewed a gallon of the 20 year old Pu-Erh and added a cup and a quarter of sugar.  I'm just waiting for it to cool down before adding the scoby.  I separated the old scoby into two and I'm preserving one just in case things don't work out.
The Kefir grains are doing ok.  I had to remove some to bring the production down to something manageable.  So far I can't bring myself to eat the spare grains but soon the question will need to be called.  Either I eat them, give them, or flush them.

I came across a quite beautiful visualization of whale vocalization in the New Scientist.  I wondered if it would be something worthy of the label Smart Graphic.  The images are created through algorithmic means with an aim to clearer representation of the sounds.   I suppose the visualization could be labelled smart because a more precise tool was used to transform a sound into an image, but I think only if that transformation is useful for a particular aim.  Is beauty a sufficient aim?  Are the images more beautiful than the sounds?   Could the images provide a better way of classifying different types of whales like showing differences and similarities that would have been harder to identify with just the sound?  Perhaps if beauty is the only aim, the conversation stops short, and so does the Smart in Smart Graphic. 

A song for this post.