Hey nexuz,

just as a tip I will recount a tale of the last time I used q21's method. this is probably going to seem really obvious to some but I was kind baffled at first until I realized what had happened.
It had been the first time I had extracted or fooled with anything related to the Spice in something like a year and a half, and I went ahead and did a pretty big haul. I think something like 250 g of source material. well, thats about the upper weight limit for my kitchen when it comes to q21's, cause it tends to take up a lot of space with the paste and everything. I did everything and it all went smoothly, got a little single electric burner so I could do my hot water bath outside or w,e (I have a gas stove so I don't use that for the bath).. fast forward to the next night and I'm checking my jars to see how much snowed out but there was only the slightest residue on the side of the jar..

I thought about it for the rest of the night and couldn't figure it out till the next morning, but what had happened was this : (some will probably shake their heads at this lol but I didn't think about it) during the acidification step, I had added boiling water that had come from my tap - which is well water, and which runs through something like 700 feet of limestone and I have tested its pH at like 8.5. SO short story long USE DISTILLED WATER or other wise like my inattentive ass you will be turning your quick q21q21 into a looong modified q21q21 STB limetek.

The Silver lining is that, as stated in the tek, it will work even if the acid step doesn't for whatever reason such as the one I experienced above, but it will take at least 2-3 days to get any results and honestly I did like 4-5 pulls over the course of a few weeks on that pile and continued to have yields so the lime was still slowly working on the Spice, it just isn't strong enough to do it quickly.

Hello AFR,
q21's uses vinegar to soak the material with. Then add the water. Was the vinegar unable to turn your base tap water into an acid water?

I've heard before of people having high pH tap water, and the other one had unsuccessful aya brews until he bought plastic flask water. But he didn't used vinegar for making aya. In your case I would think a dash of vinegar would win from some minerals in the water?

The generalization that anyone can use tap water for making aya is short sighted, as if they know all tap waters all over the world and tried them.

I didn't measure the water or the vinegar, but it was no more than 150 ml of either. I don't know maybe it could have been more volume but it was just enough to make 200 g of jurema powder to a slurry. I think on the time mentioned above, I added the room temperature vinegar and then like one or two minutes later added nearly boiling well water . I thought the vinegar would have been enough to beat the limestone in the water but it wasn't.