After 4 hours of stopping aeration the aerobic (air breathing) bacteria begin to die off. Your tea will begin to develope more anaerobic bacteria and fungi which can possibly introduce harmful pathogens to your soil. Their is a place for anaerobic teas in organic gardening, but for the sake of keeping things simple anaerobic teas will not benefit what we are using them for. Now, if you keep aerating your tea beyond 24 hours, more beneficial fungi will begin to develope. By the time you reach 36hours your tea should be more fungally dominant, which is an excellent tea for non fruit bearing plants. Throughout this process if your organisms you are cultivating run out of food they will begin to consume each other, you don't want this because when brewing tea, the point is to maximize the amount of beneficial bacteria and fungi. This is what the molasses and or alfalfa meal is for. You can add too much food, and off the top of my head I can't recall the negative effects of overfeeding a tea are. All this info is directly from the book Teaming with Microbes. To know exactly whay is going on in your tea youwould need an exspensive electron microscope (not practical for most of us). So using a tried and true tea, that someone with an electeon microscope has observed and studied, is our best bet to achieving what you want from a tea.
