DIY Kombucha!

I've been receiving a lot of questions recently about a certain unnamed natural grocery chain's kombucha recall. Elevated alcohol levels led to the product being pulled until manufacturers relabel to reflect more accurate alcohol contents. The eta on product returning to stores is indeterminate, although it seems it will be soon.

But in the meantime, brewing kombucha at home is easy and incredibly economical. If you're wondering what the hell kombucha is, here's the wikipedia page on it. In a nutshell it's a fermented tea. You take green or black tea, add sugar and the kombucha culture, then let it ferment for a week. The result is a delicious slightly effervescent probiotic filled beverage.

How to Make Kombucha

Ingredients
Glass gallon bowl or jar, wide mouth
Don't use plastic or metal. I use a fishbowl from Longs, ahem, CVS
8 tea bags, green or black
You can play with different kinds of tea, but it needs to be caffeinated. Lately I've been getting lovely results with Yerba Mate.
1 cup sugar
Use cane sugar for best results, but you can play with sweeteners after your 1st batch.
Kombucha mother
Each batch you make with grow a new kombucha culture. You can reuse the old one or use the new one. Save the kombucha in a glass jar with a little bit of tea.

How to

1. Boil the water to make tea. Let tea steep for 5 minutes.
2. Remove tea bags and stir in sugar, make sure it dissolves.
3. Wait until tea cools to room temp before adding kombucha culture (you don't want to cook it). I usually leave mine on the counter overnight with a cloth over it, then add the culture in the morning.
4. Cover the opening of your container with a paper towel and rubber band. This allows air to get in (important for fermentation) but not fruit flies or other critters.
5. Put the date on your container (sticky notes work well). You want it to ferment for 7-10 days, but you should taste it at around 7 days. It should be sweet and a little bit sharp, but it won't be as sharp or carbonated tasting as GT's/Synergy. The sweetness wanes and the tartness waxes with time.
6. Unless your apartment is really warm and it's summer time, you should put it in the oven with the light on (you can add oven light bulbs to your ingredient list). It needs to be above 90 degrees to ferment properly.
   
7. When the kombucha is ready:
   

• remove the culture, it will be floating on top of the tea. I rinse it to get off some of the brown gunk. Sometimes the new and old ("baby" and "mother") cultures get kind of stuck together and you have to gently separate them. Sometimes I save the old one and the new one, sometimes I only save the new one. You can discard the old one in your sink if you have a disposal system, or you can compost. Any cultures that I'm saving I put into a glass jar with some of the kombucha tea.
• Use clean bottles to bottle the tea. I reuse store bought kombucha bottles, and I prefer the brown ones to protect the "delicate" cultures.
• Strain the tea into bottles. You can use a coffee filter or a mesh strainer. Coffee filters take a long time though. Straining just makes it so there's not little brown floaties, although bottled kombucha will start to grow it's own floaties after a while.
• Keep your bottled kombucha refrigerated, and enjoy! Lemon juice makes a nice addition to the tea.
  

Notes

• The culture will look pretty disgusting as it's fermenting. As long as the lumps are fairly smooth and brown though, it's all good. Anything green and fuzzy or pink would be cause for alarm, and I would toss the batch.
• The culture feeds off of caffeine and sugar, and it's my understanding that there isn't any active caffeine or sugar left when it's done fermenting. You'll notice that the longer it ferments, the less sweet it tastes. You won't get good results with the kombucha if you leave out caffeinated tea or sugar, although you could play with the amounts.

I have a couple mothers in my fridge looking for a home, if anyone wants one! Perhaps someone has a sourdough culture they'd like to swap??

Happy brewing!