I have a guy on a separate forum harassing tea makers (almost a cyber bully about it), saying that they should be using a microscope each and every tea brewing session, before brewing and after to identify if they are brewing any harmful microbes.
I've been brewing aact (actually, vermicompost tea) for several years now, and nobody from my family has ever gotten ill from plants we have eaten, and all plants have responded in a healthy manner. Eating out in restaurants, well that is a different story.

Anybody want to weigh in on the microscope obsession?

I'll weigh in on it. If you want to know what you have in the tea, you have to look at every batch for about the first 100 batches. After that, if your process is settled down, you can probably make a good, educated, guess as to the quality of your tea. But without the microscope, you can't know what you have. You just can't.

Having said that, if the tea started out with excellent smelling compost, and you used fresh water from a bacteria free source, and the tea itself smells good, it probably does not have any bad stuff in it. The bad stuff will not magically appear without being "seeded" into the compost. Using manure or anything stinky instead of excellent compost will definitely be a problem, though.

Ditto!

To each there own, but there is no art to bacteria (beneficial or non)... It's science.

If you don't know what you have to start with, then you don't know what you are brewing...

and if you don't examine what you have brewed, then you don't know what you have.

Tons of people contract illnesses from handling manure each yr. I recommend caution any time you handle any type of waste.

Knowing, is always better than guessing.