Making Kombucha

Supplies

• 1 gallon wide mouth jar
• 1 cup of organic sugar (not honey)
• 1 ounce of organic tea leaf
• large pot for cooking 1 gallon of water
• mason jars (if using whole fruit for secondary fermentation)- whatever size you wish to maintain OR bailer jars- if you are using an organic prepared juice. Whole fruit will not come back out of the bailer of course.
• mesh strainer
• second glass jar for storing your new scobbie after the initial fermentation

A Few Easy Steps– Let’s Make Kombucha

Clean a 1 gallon jar and set aside. Do not use bleach. Any residue will kill your scobbie.

Using a large pot, heat 1 gallon + 1 quart approx. of clean purified water. If you don’t have a purifier, I would choose distilled water from the store. When it comes to a boil, stir in the sugar and tea leaf.

Turn the heat down after it comes back to a boil and simmer it. Do not boil your tea, but simmer it with the lid on.  Cook for 20 minutes.

Turn the heat off and remove the pot from the burner. Set it aside, lid on, and let it cool naturally.  If you do this in the evening, just leave it set until the next morning. This tea-sugar-water combination needs to come back to room temperature.

When the solution is cooled to room temperature, strain the tea leaf off using a mesh strainer. This is not fussy. A few particles in the water is not a problem. Just stain it into the clean gallon jar. Now pour in the 1 cup of starter and scobbie.

Put a coffee filter over the jar opening and secure it with a rubber band. This keep the dust out or any potential insect. It would be terrible to ruin you whole batch with a fly for example.

Set the jar somewhere away from sun. Any counter out of direct sunlight is fine. Some say it has to be dark. It doesn’t. I just put it on the counter and mark the filter paper with my start and end date. Amazingly you do forget what day you began!

7 days later you initial fermentation is complete. If the room is cold or if there is a variation of the process being complete, understand this is also perfectly okay. Any amount of time needed up to a full 30 days is ok, over 30 days, discard and start over. It is complete when a new scobbie has formed across the surface of the tea. It will be about 1/4 inch thick and fully cover the tea water. When this occurs, you are done. If it goes longer, don’t worry about it. Just continue until it forms. A 2 gallon jar in a cool room has taken me about 21 days to form the scobbie.

Now that it is ready, and initial fermentation is complete, taking a clean glass jar, put some of the tea into it which acts as your starter. You can use more than a cup, but you need at least 1 cup. Remove your scobbie and rinse it with cold tap water to clean off the brown ugly residue (you’ll know what I mean).  Take the scobbie and put it in the new jar with the starter. If not starting your next batch, put it in the refrigerator. Put a lid on it and set it in the fridge, this will allow it to go dormant until ready for your next batch. If allowing it to go dormant, it MUST be refrigerated. Feed it a little tea-sugar water every 2-3 weeks. Scobbies eat sugar, feeding them keeps them viable while lying in dormancy. When you feed the scobbie, always cook the tea and sugar for 20 minutes and let it cool completely to room temperature. This prevents bad bacteria from contaminating your product.

After the new scobbie is put away, now we begin the fun part- Secondary Fermentation. Any fruit you want to use is your option. Bear in mind that Secondary Fermentation needs natural sugar. For example, grape juice is sweet and ferments very easily and is much more effervescent than orange juice. The more natural sugar in the juice or fruit you use, the more you will have to “burp” your bottles. Two ways to use the fruit juice are;

No. 1–  real whole fruit. Use organic of course and coarsely chop it up and add it directly to wide mouth jar with the prepared product

No. 2–  organic bottled prepared juice.  1 quart of juice is perfect for a 1 gallon size.

Mix the strained tea-sugar water from the initial fermentation with your fruit or fruit juice and seal it with a lid or bailer wire. Set it anywhere out of sunlight at room temperature. Allow this to set for about 4 days. Burp it as often as needed. It will build up pressure and burping is mandatory. Grape juice for example will need about 3 burps a day to reduce pressure. If you don’t do this, the jar will expand and break, splattering your product all over the place. After 4 days, it is ready for the refrigerator without doing anything else. Put the bottles in the refrigerator and let them set for 10-14 days. If at the end of 14 days you have used whole fruit, strain it off and put it back in the bottle. If using juice, it is ready as is.

*Variation for Fermenting Time:  The 6-7 days of initial fermentation time is based on a 1 gallon size.  When I have used a 2 gallon jar, it takes between 14 to 21 days to form a full rich sized scobbie. It seems the larger the jar mouth size, the longer it takes to form a scobbie- also depending upon the room temperature.  Warmer rooms ferment faster, cooler rooms take longer. If the mouth size of the jar opening is small, the time will be less to form the scobbie, the larger the surface space, the longer it takes. This is of no concern. Just keep in mind, 30 days is your maximum. Whatever time it takes between 7 days and 30 days is perfectly okay.

Pointers;  Always start with a good tea leaf for the initial fermentation. This tea determines the base quality of your Kombucha. The better the tea, the better the antioxidant qualities. If you wish to use the same 1 oz. of tea blend I generally use for your initial starter, it is “Skinny Tea”.  I don’t use this for losing weight, but I do use it because it has 5 different tea leaves along with Guayusa and Yerba Mate.  If you want to, you can also add an herb or two with the tea leaf for medicinal purposes. I often add some Astragalus and Ashwagandha because of the health benefits, not required, but a nice addition.  Any of these are available at Organica.  If you wish to use something else, be sure it is organic and loose, not poor quality tea bags although many people use them. Start your Scoby Hotel with your first batch.

Making More Scobbies

You can take the large surface scobbie and divide it up into a few pieces. Take each piece and put it into a pint mason jar with the cup of starter. This can be used to ferment a new scobbie. It takes about 7 days as usual and then you can just put it in the refrigerator until ready for use or to give away. Any piece of your scobbie will make another one. The important thing is to be sure you have a cup of starter with each piece, ferment it for 7 days and now you have another one. This is how you make more of them to give to others. The only expense you have it to get started, after this it really costs nothing except for the juice and tea for each new batch.

Buy a scobbie once and you can use this to make as many as you want for your friends and family.

Questions? Send me a facebook message-  facebook.com/organicateas