Welcome to ATP, maxcaviar!
Are you incubating your recipe for a day or two, with aeration?
Also, I didn't see any compost in your recipe, except for the worm castings. I guess if they are fresh castings, they will carry soil microbes into your mix.
My own belief about compost tea is that we gardeners might be enthusiastic and quick to think that compost (which we love) really helped some plants, but many people believe that spraying well-aerated compost tea on their plants caused a significant, visible improvement.
In the face of experienced people reporting a consistent effect, scientists shouldn't say "that can't happen". They should say "We have not yet found controlled experiments that reproduce the effect, so we can't explain the root cause for the alleged improvement"
Either many gardeners are wrong about what they think they see, or very simple, very highly controlled experiments by scientists (perhaps eager to pooh-pooh "folk lore" from "non-union-members" who mostly lack advanced degrees in horticulture) failed to reproduce an effect that probably has complex roots.
Sort of like physicians and pharmacologists who sneered at "old women playing with herbs" until they finally had techniques where they could detect and analyze digitalis and aspirin and other active principles in herbs or bark or roots.
Like scientists who laughed at "gullible simpletons" who believed that rocks could fall from the sky. Until they had the explanation "meteorites", they would not believe people who saw things with their own eyes.
Simple people: two.
Scientists: zero.
I seem to recall reading other articles that had no trouble believing that spraying compost tea on leaves could leave behind increased numbers (or variety) of protective micro-organisms, contributing to plant health. I think they liked the word "phytosphere", and that made it "OK" to believe something that they had not invented themselves.
Maybe the benefit or A benefit is simple foliar feeding.
Maybe the scientists felt they had to "control for" that effect and avoided it in their experiments.
Maybe the benefit is that the soil was indeed lacking something that the tea provided, but the experiments used fertile soil.
The gardeners tend to say things like "the plants grew better" while the scientists tend to say things like "we did not detect increased blahblahblah in the babelbabelbabel". I'm glad the scientists are looking for specific, reproducible causes they can quantify. That's the only way to find out the relevant REASONS it seems to be beneficial.
But if a sincere scientist were trying to determine WHETHER the practice can confer benefits in the FIELD, he or she would go to some gardener who DOES get the good effects in a complex, uncontrolled setting, and then poke around to see if they can tell WHY. But they can't publish a paper that way!
That's very different from constructing highly controlled and simple experiments (publishable experiments) where the effect does NOT happen, and then say "it can't happen anywhere".
