If you want more bacteria than fungus is what hes saying.. Simple carbohydrates are easier to metabolize by bacteria.
My feeling is you're virtually always going to have more bacteria than fungi in a compost tea. Most bacteria seem to like, or at least not mind floating about in solution. Most fungi seem to prefer being anchored to something. Fungi have hyphae and can physically penetrate solid objects with it (sexy, I know). They secrete (ohh yeah) enzymes which help them do a lot of their digesting outside of the cell (extracellularly), which I imagine could be difficult in a solution where stuff keeps floating by and away.
Fungi will grow in teas, though, under the right conditions. The more fungal filaments you have to begin with, the greater the likelihood you'll succeed at getting something dominated by fungi. The typical procedure is to "jump start" the fungi in the compost\humus you're using. You do this by taking a cup full of compost and mixing in a foodstock with the tougher to digest components like cellulose and lignin. Something like oatmeal, flax seed meal, brown rice flour, etc. kelp meal should work, too. If you use oatmeal or a bulkier material, grind it up first to near powder consistency.
Moisten after mixing, but try not to get it too wet, then put it somewhere warm and dark. You may want to cover it partially as you also don't want it to dry out. After 3-5 days or more you'll have a fuzzy white (and maybe green, or yellowish) mass of mycelium. Break this up into nugget, nickle-quarter sized pieces and brew with it.
Now, in this case you really don't want a lot of blackstrap, perhaps a teaspoon if any. Too much sugar is still likely to get the bacteria rocking. Even if they are utilizing different food sources they're still competing for space and other resources, especially oxygen.
Some of the more advanced bacteria have filaments reminiscent of fungal hyphae, including Actinobacteria in the genus
Streptomyces, from which we derive a significant chunk of our arsenal of natural antibiotics. As a matter of fact, humans stole the very idea of antibiotics from... a fungus (
Penicillium sp).
Can I try to x-late? Its all a crap shoot.
It could help your plants and help bad bacteria or
it could help your plants and not help bad bacteria.
Since it can help fungi, it might be good towards the end
of your flowering, so the fungi that are helped, don't do
much harm before you're finished.
Why, then, ’tis none to you, for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
It's not really a gamble or anything, the only real requirements for a basic\quality AACT are: start with good-high quality compost\humus\EWC, don't use bad water, and use an air-pump or brewer capable of keeping the solution sufficiently oxygenated. What you don't want is to use compost that has gone anaerobic (smells bad), or allow anaerobic microbes to grow in a tea. That would be due to lack of oxygen and could either allow pathogenic anaerobes to breed, or result in alcohols which are toxic to plants. AACT should never smell bad, but earthy.
The great majority of bacteria (and archaea) and fungi are not 'bad'. AACT is
actively aerated, and the microbes we're aiming for are mostly obligate or facultative aerobes. Virtually all fungi are aerobic, with the exception of
Neocallimastigomycota which live in the digestive tracts of ruminants. The fungi in compost and AACT are mostly saprophytes which decay organic matter and do not attack healthy, living plants (they wait for the plant to die). Some opportunistic fungi will attack weak plants which are on the verge of death. The thing is that these fungi (and the really bad fungi like
Botrytis sp) are ubiquitous, with spores probably already floating about the air in your grow room, and on the leaves of your plants.
Quality compost\castings should not really have pathogens in the first place. Any opportunists are actually suppressed by the activity of beneficial or neutral microbes in the material. The best of the beneficial microbes live in harmony or symbiosis with the plant roots in the rhizosphere. Plant roots exude compounds to feed these microbes and actually influence what kinds of microbial communities are growing there.
Microbes live on plant leaves, as well. When you foliar/spray finished AACT, you cover the leaves in a layer of microbes which will continue to exert their beneficial effects. At the very least, a microbe can be "good" simply by not being "bad": taking up space and resources, and out-competing the microbes which could really do the plant harm.
