Creating Kombucha, Part Ewwwwwwww

I discovered that one of my jars had a little bit too much going on.

Is that what I think it is?

I hope it goes without saying that mold is a deal breaker when it comes to brewing.  Fermentation is the only metabolic process allowed, period.  The whole thing has to be tossed, right after you photograph it artily in a weirdly matchy bowl.

Like a SCOBY in a bridesmaid dress.

And then start again from scratch.  Luckily SCOBY is self-replenishing and I'm in it up to my elbows.  Back to the brewery* I go.

*Kitchen.  I only have a kitchen.

Update 2.6.14:
This happened again.  Both times it happened with green tea by a company called Williamson Tea, which I'm not really familiar with.  All the tea came from one box.  I'm not sure if maybe this is an effect of using green tea (rather than black) and the green spotting on the SCOBY is normal, but I threw the second batch out anyway.  Next time I'll use a different brand of green tea and document the results.  HOLD YOUR BREATH.

Creating Kombucha II: The Reaping

I promised to check back in about my kombucha progress, and now I'm late to my own deadline.  In my defense, I was kept rather busy with things like Christmas and New Year's and a very cold trip to Quebec (more on that later), but I do owe an update.

The first batch I made, I used 20 black tea bags and a cup of sugar, and I let it sit for about 2 1/2 weeks.  The result was a little bit sour and flat; certainly the taste fell within the ballpark of "kombucha," but it was no great achievement.  It did, however, produce a new SCOBY, which grew separately from the mother.

You can kinda see it here; it's the gross-looking piece that's sitting on top of the other gross-looking piece.

So I pulled that out and gave it its own mason jar to grow in.  I did a little troubleshooting with the help of this excellent page from Phoenix Helix, which has all sorts of helpful hints about how to optimize your kombucha brew, and I made some tweaks in the new batch.

My second batch of kombucha was a little light on the black tea, since I was running low.  I used 14 black tea bags and one cup of sugar in each jar, and I let them sit for just about two weeks apiece.  When I bottled the tea after two weeks, I kept the bottles at room temperature for a day before refrigerating.  This allowed the tea to ferment in the bottle a little longer, so that it would be nice and fizzy when I went to drink it.  Here is the result:

After I guzzled half of it, of course.

It was delicious.  Well, delicious by kombucha standards, which is never going to quite match up to, say, tiramisu.  It was a little on the sweet side, likely because it could have used a little more tea to even things out, but it was nice and fizzy and there was no sour tang at all.

One of these bottles does not contain the equivalent of 20 tea bags and a cup of sugar, by the way.  That would be more like brewing Red Bull than kombucha.  The tea and the sugar are what feed the SCOBY, and the fermentation process gets rid of most, if not all, the caffeine and sugar.  For more information on how that works, you can also check out Phoenix Helix, which is really quite comprehensive in its coverage of kombucha brewing.  I'm still just a rube with a couple of mason jars.

Anyway, the next step is to brew three jars in a batch.  A person could continue multiplying their kombucha output indefinitely, since each fermentation produces a new SCOBY mother, but at the moment I only own three mason jars so I'm limited in my options.  It's good to use the same SCOBY over and over, letting it grow and peeling off the dead bits, so that you're working with a nice big wad of healthy bacteria and yeast each time.  Although I guess you can't let it get too big, since you'll need some space for liquid in there, too.

A fresh batch with an XL mother.

I've been drinking a bit every day.  It's still too early to claim any definitive health benefits, but I'll keep posting updates on my venture into the world of brewing.  One final note: It's good to keep the SCOBY rich and gross with live cultures, but contamination is dangerous, so I make sure to wash the jars and bottles thoroughly between uses.  This also affords me the opportunity to pull the SCOBY out and place it in a bowl, where I can examine it more closely and marvel at how bonkers nature actually is.

Creating Kombucha, or My Mother the SCOBY

“I have your mother in the car.”

This is a pretty ominous text message, and it took me a minute to register the threat.  Luckily I had no bandits to battle or ransoms to pay.  My friend Emily was driving home from her parents’ house in New Hampshire, where her dad brews kombucha tea.  She was bringing me a mother kombucha, so that I could try brewing my own.

Pictured here: all the ingredients you need.

Kombucha is a special type of fermented tea that’s grown from a “mother” culture called a Symbiotic Colony of Bacteria and Yeast (yummy!), or SCOBY.  I hate acronyms (they always look like yelling) so I’m going to just keep calling it the mother.  When the mother is allowed to feed on tea and sugar for an extended period of time, it evolves into kombucha, a special type of tea that does something. 

But what does it do?  That question has no easy answer.  You can search and search the Internet, but information about kombucha is conflicting, and there is very little in the way of citations.  Kristen at Food Renegade is a staunch promoter of kombucha, but right off the bat she refers to its “rich anecdotal history” (emphasis mine).  Kristen also claims that the reason kombucha isn't being held up for scientific scrutiny is because it’s too easy to brew at home, and therefore not profitable for the pharmaceutical industry.

That’s certainly a compelling argument, and I do love to side with renegades, but Kristen’s listed sources are somewhat less than reputable. One of them is a weird, rambling essay written in 1993, and another is a website written entirely in Comic Sans.  A third appears to have been run one too many times through Google Translator.  It’s comprehensive, but a little bit goofy.

The opposing side is no more scientific in its arguments.  The Mayo Clinic seems content to rest on its laurels for this debate, issuing a terse warning to avoid the brew altogether.  For its part, the American Cancer Society appears equally unconvinced, albeit with a bit more of an explanation.  

Meanwhile, Synergy, one of the most recognizable names in kombucha commerce, makes no claims whatsoever on its website, scientific or otherwise, choosing instead to let the product speak for itself.

Although this photo of the CEO suggests benefits include white teeth and perpetual radiance.