Few month ago, the cafe at my office was starting to sell Kombucha drinks. I've read about it online but never knew how it was so just bought one bottle to see how it is. As I tasted it, it just clicked, "I know this taste!", yes! my mum used to make it when I was a kid, that was like in the 80's, oh boy! The only difference was my mum used to force me to drink the flat raw one which I ended up liking the taste after few times. This brought back a lot of childhood memories hehehe.
So I decided to contact my local Freecycle group to see if anyone was brewing some buch and wouldn't mind sharing a SCOBY. I was lucky as someone was brewing in 20L buckets and gave me a nice big SCOBY and some starter tea.
As usual, Youtube is the best place to find recipes and I found several on how to make Kombucha and discovered the magic of second fermentation. This second fermentation phase allows you to add flavour to your Kombucha tea by adding either fresh fruit juice or fruit slices. But most importantly, the second fermentation is a phase required to introduce carbonation to your brew, that is making it fizzy like soda! Seriously, drinking non fizzy Kombucha is missing on a lot of fun :-D
I started in this glass jar, but ended up buying another one as the shape of the jar made some odd shaped SCOBY and it also makes it more difficult to clean the jar afterwards.
My favorite glass jar is the following one, it is very popular in the Kombucha world. This one is a 6L jar I think and works perfectly well. It's a shame the shop where I bought it does not stock them anymore.
But seriously, any jar would do, it could be made of glass, ceramic or even plastic (even though there is a debate on whether plastic is good or not...). If you don't mind plastic then you could even use 20 L buckets, the type used for fishing, to brew for the whole family. In the photo above, I have a ceramic jar and several glass ones that are the large Moccona coffee jars (probably 2L). I'm currently brewing 12 Litres at a time.
Below are fermenting jars and bottles in which I've added 1/4 of clouded apple juice for a second fermentation phase that lasts 3 to 4 days.
I usually place the 2nd fermentation bottles in an esky because the fermentation produces a lot of carbonation and the bottle can explode due to the extreme pressure. The esky reduces the mess when this occurs (I need to clean up that esky now, I forgot about it until today when I went to take the photo, yuck... lol):
Here is the recipe I'm following:
- I boil up 1L of water and add 3 bags of black tea and 4 bags of green tea and leave it for 3 - 5 minutes
- I then add 5x 1/4 cups of sugar
- I top up with 3L of filtered water
- I add 1 cup of starter tea (which is just the Kombucha from a previous batch)
- the SCOBY is added last, it might sink, float mid-depth or float on the surface
- I then take a napkin or cloth and cover the jar and hold it in place with a rubber band
If you don't have a SCOBY, try to ask around in your local communities or buy a commercial Kombucha that is raw Kombucha with nothing added and not sterilized. Mix that raw Kombucha 50/50 with the sweet tea and wait for 15-30 days, after a week you should see a baby SCOBY forming on the surface, let it grow 1 - 2 cm thick and you can use it to make your brew.
Depending on the ambient temperatures, the time required will vary between 7 - 15 days, at my place I will start tasting the Kombucha from 9 days:
Every now and then, I will remove the cloth just to check if everything is OK, I especially check for any fluffy growth on the surface which indicates mold, in which case I would have to throw the whole content of the jar, including the SCOBY and start over.
When the Kombucha taste good, slightly sweet with a good vinegary taste (you can wait a bit longer if you want less sugar), I will remove the SCOBY, keep the Kombucha on the surface to be used as starter tea for the next batch. In a bottle, I would add 1/5 - 1/4 of fruit juice (our favorite is cloudy apple juice) and fill the rest with the raw Kombucha. The bottles are then left outside for 3 - 4 more days and then transferred to the fridge to stop the fermentation. When you open the bottle, you will hear a pop and the gas escaping.
Now, Kombucha is our favorite drink, even my wife who usually does not like fizzy drinks is now addicted to Kombucha and also love water Kefir (which I will talk about in a future post). The bonus for us is, of course, the beneficial/medicinal properties of these probiotic drinks. I will not enumerate those properties as I prefer doing so only if I can support them with scientific papers and those can be found very easily on Google, so do your side of the homework.