Brewing Kombucha

Brewing Kombucha

I used to be scared of fermentation, but once you start doing it you see how hard it is to actually mess it up!

My kombucha journey started with me posting on a Facebook mom's group asking if anyone had an extra scoby. A scoby is a mother culture or if you be fancy a "symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast." They are slimy, creepy looking things:
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See, creepy riiiight?

So then I picked up my scoby in some starter tea in a jar in a brown paper bag on some stranger's back porch. It felt like an illicit drug transaction.

I actually left my scoby in my fridge for months because I was nervous. Thank goodness scobies are forgiving creatures! Here's a http://holisticsquid.com/has-my-scoby-gone-bad-and-other-kombucha-questions-answered/ with pictures of what a good vs. bad scoby looks like because they do eventually go bad.

To get started I brewed a gallon of tea using 8 standard Lipton black tea bags. Then I put it into this gallon glass jar and covered it with this cute tea towell and secured it with a rubber band.

tea-towell

Then, you leave it brewing on your counter - away from heat so not near your stove - for two weeks. At this point, you can add fruit or herbs to flavor it for another week or you can drink it.

kombucha

Then I like to put my kombucha in pop top bottles and store them in the fridge. Don't forget to leave some tea behind to start your next batch though!

About $3 worth of tea bags will produce 3-4 pop top bottles of kombucha - a lot cheaper than the $5/bottle you can get at the store!

finished-kombucha-1

My scoby is actually pretty big now so I should trim it and compost, give it away, or feed it to my chickens. It's called making "scoby babies."