Kombucha is a fermented beverage that falls into the category of live probiotic food. The name “kombucha’ is actually a misnomer (not cha/tea made of kombu) but it has caught on, and is now entrenched in popular nomenclature. Kombucha has a deep history from the Orient, to Eastern Asia, Russia and into Europe. It’s basically fermented black tea sweetened with sugar and cultured with a SCOBY. This is an acronym for Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria and Yeast. The green tea-honey version is called ‘Jun’, but its basically the same idea, and my current Kombucha culture came from a Jun that I then added to black tea and sugar.
Primary Fermentation
Ingredients:
8 C water (1/2 recipe: 4 C water)
2 teaspoons/10g of loose black tea, or 2 black*** tea bags. ***(what about decaf ? see note below) English breakfast, Oolong, or orange pekoe are great. You could also use green. (1/2 recipe; 1 teabag)
3/4 C sugar (any kind, doesn’t need to be special, I use plain ole’ white sugar) You could also use honey (use 2/3 the amount of honey - it’s sweeter) or maple syrup, or agave etc. It just cannot be fake - the microbes need real carbohydrates to metabolize! (1/2 recipe: 3/8 C sugar)
SCOBY plus some of it’s previous fermentation liquid - this is the source of the microbial culture
Equipment:
Large jar or bowl (that can hold 8 C/2 Liters/1 gallon, not metal) (1/2 recipe; 4 C quart jar)
clean tea towel and rubber band
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Put the loose or bagged tea in a tea pot, and add boiling water - cover, steep (30 min - overnight), and then cool. Discard the tea bags or leaves.
Add brewed tea to the jar, add water to make up a total of 8 C and add 3/4 C sugar (or the 1/2 amounts) - dissolve. Put today’s date on the jar with a sharpie.
Add your SCOBY plus liquid to the diluted sweet tea. Cover with a tea towel and secure with a rubber band so nothing flies in, and wait 1-2 weeks.
I suggest tasting it every day so you get an idea of how it progresses. Using a clean spoon, dip out some of the liquid from underneath the newly-forming SCOBY. It will go from very sweet to slightly vinegary and fizzy on the tongue. How far you let it go is up to you. It will move faster in warmer months, and slower in cooler temperatures.
Secondary Fermentation
If you want to get fancy with flavors, you can take the liquid from the first batch (not the scoby), add more food (in the form of fruit sugar), and put it into corked vessels that will trap the CO2 and make a fizzier beverage.
Ingredients:
Liquid from the primary fermentation (leave about 2 inches of liquid in with the mother SCOBY)
Fruit juice (pasteurized or freshly squeezed/prepared) or pieces of clean fruit or berries, any combination
Equipment:
Clean funnel is useful for pouring kombucha from first batch into bottles without a big mess.
Clean corked bottles. I like the grolsch or swing armed ones, and I also like using old liquor bottles - they are so pretty with the colorful kombucha in it.
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Put juice or fruit in the bottom of the bottles, and carefully pour some of the primary kombucha liquid on top. Leave a good 3-4 inches of space at the top of the bottles. Cork the bottles, put in a cupboard at room temperature and wait 2-6 days. Burp the bottles every day. I suggest you also taste them every day to get an idea of how fast they will move. If the primary ferment is quite sour, the secondary won’t need very much time, and could tip over into vinegar quickly, so keep an eye (taste bud?) on them. A new baby SCOBY will form in the secondary too, since it is from the same culture as the mother. You might want to remove that before refrigerating - up to you. I shake the bottle and then pour the kombucha through a strainer into a glass. This way I get the benefit of the liquid culture, but not the solids. Some folks simply consume them ( I just can’t… too slimy.)
Once you are happy with how they taste, move them to the fridge where they will slow down drastically, and be a more refreshing beverage. The cool thing about these is that they re-fizz themselves overnight due to the slow fermentation that still occurs in the corked bottles.
Kombucha may be consumed as-is, or used as mixers or soda replacers in cocktails or mocktails.
*** Remember that kombucha is a caffeinated beverage. Commercially decaffeinated teas can be treated with various chemicals like ethyl acetate or methylene chloride. If you wish to make a more decaf version, you can pre-steep the original black tea bags for 30 seconds to remove some of the caffeine - though sadly it actually turns out it doesn’t reduce the caffeine level that much. Drain off that water, and proceed as if that never happened. Remember to label everything with date started and whether it’s + or - caffeine. But again, DIY decaffeinating doesn’t remove that much caffeine. You could also use your SCOBY to make kombucha with a tisane/naturally decaffeinated tea, for example chamomile. But the SCOBY does prefer to be caffeinated, so every other batch REcaffeinate your mother SCOBY by doing a regular black tea brew.
My favorite flavors right now are: black raspberry, raspberry, lavender, ginger, peach, and lemon-rosemary. Basically what I have around the house with frozen berries or fruit from the summer. Other great flavors are pomegranate, sour cherry and blueberry, which I create by buying bottles of organic juice from the store. Once the juice is open, keep it refrigerated, or it will ferment, because everything ferments!! I pour the juice into ice cube trays so I can store small amounts in the freezer that I may then add to future secondary ferments.
Secondary Ferment flavors; Add about 1/4 C of liquid pasteurized juice, fresh squeezed juice, a few berries, to some lightly smashed fruit slices to a clean bottle 2/3 full of your strained primary ferment (once you are happy with the flavor and kick). This is where you can get very creative.
pear-ginger
toasted coriander and lime (toast and crush 2 teaspoons coriander seeds, add to bottle along with the juice of 1 lime) ** this one is delicious!
blueberry (add 1/4 blueberry juice) or 1/4 C of smashed (washed) fresh or frozen blueberries
tart cherry (add 1/4 tart cherry juice to the bottle)
raspberry (add 6 cleaned raspberries -frozen OK- to the bottle. Be sure to check for mold on the raspberries, there’s always an evil one somewhere...)
lemon-rosemary
strawberry-sage
rosa rugosa petals (beyond amazing - 5-6 flowers-worth of petals and it’s like you are drinking beautiful light roses. collect your rose petals away from roadways and other pollution sources. I like gathering them near beaches.)
If you forget about your flavored kombucha and it goes waaaaay too sour, then you have kombucha vinegar! Use it to make salad dressings or give soups or sauces a bright acid note. I forgot a raspberry secondary once, and made a (lot of) delicious raspberry vinaigrette.
Trouble shooting: how to get “fizz”:
The fizz is the “exhaled” carbon dioxide from the metabolic processes of the microbes. Just like us, they eat the sugar, which occur in 5- and 6- carbon chains, then break them apart into single carbon molecules. This process liberates and recaptures the stored energy between the carbon bonds. We also obtain energy from our food in this manner, and have a name for this process: metabolism. We eat foods which are made up of mixtures of fats, carbohydrates and proteins, break them apart and use them as building blocks to build and repair our bodies, and harvest the energy between the carbon bonds. We use oxygen to do it, and we exhale the most broken down and oxidized form of carbon; a single carbon atom with two oxygens attached, also known as carbon dioxide/CO2. The microbes do it in other ways, using water, but also end up releasing CO2. This is the fizz. Carbonation happens when you tighten the cap on the secondary fermentation so the released CO2 cannot escape from the vessel, and instead, dissolves into the liquid. Once your secondary fermentation has reached the flavor you like, tighten the cap, leave it at room temp for a few more hours for some more metabolism and CO2 release to occur and be captured in the closed vessel, and then refrigerate. Home made kombucha will never be as carbonated as many commercial brands because they are forcibly carbonated. Once you put your kombucha in the fridge, metabolism will continue, albeit at a very reduced rate. You might get discernible carbonation, or it might be too slow to really re-fizz. The microbes do go into a bit of hibernation. Another thing to check is if the lid of your bottle is air-tight.
