Vinegar

So I FINALLY got around to doing something with my root beer 'mushroom'. Loosely following some guidelines in an old 70's food preservation book, I put the mushroom in some of my leftover strawberry wine. This is the pre-wine, post-root beer picture.

I think it looks like cow afterbirth.

 Kind of gross, but really no different than a kombucha scoby.
I ended up putting the wine and mushroom in a glass bottle and covering it with a napkin to let bacteria in and out. It's supposed to stay like that for a week, then....??? I don't know. I suppose I'll compare it to apple cider vinegar or red wine vinegar. This is what it looks like now.

In the meantime, I think I have made the most delicious batch of kombucha since I started making it. I purchased some blueberry/pomegranate/acai green tea at Krogers several weeks ago, and used that in place of my usual plain green tea (my normal recipe is 4 bags black, 4 bags green). The resulting tea smelled FANTASTASTIC! It just got done fermenting today, so I threw a handful of frozen berries in the jar and put it in the fridge. I didn't drink any due to what might have been a 24-hour flu bug (no puking, but I didn't want to take any chances). It will taste better when it's chilled, anyway.