Kombucha

These are my thoughts about how to make Kombucha. If you surf the word, you will find plenty of instructions. So these don't try to be comprehensive. I'm sort of thinking out loud, but on the keyboard, if you know what I mean.

I learned how to make Kombucha just before I had surgery. Then late in my recuperation (after I went back to work) I actually started making it. I have been buying GT's Kombucha at Whole Foods and Wheatsville Food Coop. It's a bit of a pinch a pint. So, I went surfing and found that it is pretty easy to make. I used the information from a British site that was all metric, but I seem to have gotten the proportions converted fairly well. I don't claim to be an expert, but I have learned a bit in 6 months of brewing.

Actually, I just love to learn how to do everything, so GT's doesn't have to fear losing me as a customer, because there is always something else to learn.  But it is good to know how to make it.  Even if you do buy it you have more of an organic contact with it if you understand the basics of production.

Here is my plan to have Kombucha in your life but not have Kombucha BE your life.

What I do know:

1. GREEN TEA GOOD: Use green tea and make a pot about 3X stronger than you would make it to drink. Put the sugar and tea in the teapot and then when you pour the boiling water over, put a cozy on or wrap the teapot in a big fluffy towel to keep the heat from dissipating. I let it steep the whole time I'm prepping and bottling, so about 30-45 minutes.  I have found that the harsher the brew would be to drink right now, the better the Kombucha will be in 10 days to 3 weeks.  

2. BLACK TEA BAD (but only for Kombucha, because I am a rank Anglophile and love my tea). Any black tea that makes a good cuppa with milk and sugar is going to be BAD after it ferments for a couple of weeks. I used Lipton Darjeeling, an Assam and Typhoo. I did say I like my tea.  The Darjeeling is not bad mixed 1/2 and 1/2 with green. Otherwise, stick to green.

3. OOLONG TEA good to drink, not so good for Kombucha: I found a great place on eBay to get Formosa Oolong shipped to me direct from Formosa. The Ebay name is "TeahomeUS". The product and service excel. But it is just too expensive for me to use comfortably for Kombucha. Plus, it doesn't seem to develop the culture or the fizz as well as a good harsh green. But if you have never tasted Formosa Oolong, go get some direct from the island. You won't regret it. This is why they call Oolong "the champagne of teas".

4. RED TEA ok: I used Keemun, which is a red tea, for one batch. It was ok, but green makes a fizzier batch with more of a punch. (by the way, the punch is a sort of vinegary taste. A friend of mine is Muslim and has never had any alcohol in his life. I can't smell the alcohol in this, but given his cleaner background with regard to the substance he could, so I trust him that it is there. With the commercial Kombucha, I could taste and feel it. It had noticeably more alcohol - particularly the one that is not GTs, but the one that is in the shelf-stable drink section at Whole Foods and not refrigerated).  It probably didn't work as well because red tea really isn't tea because it's not Camellia sinensis, the plant that green, black and oolong come from.  It's what the French call a "tisane", in English: "a medicinal herbal infusion".  In Venn diagrams, all teas are tisanes, not all tisanes are teas.

5. RAW KOMBUCHA VS BUYING A MOTHER: If you have access to raw Kombucha, like GT's, you don't really need to buy a mother from anyone. Just wait until your nutrient solution (sweet tea) is room temp and put 1/2 cup of raw Kombucha in. Your first batch may take a few days (up to 10) to get going and form a mother. It seems like the culture has to get comfy and feel at home, because my first batch took 10 days to get a mother developed, while my second took about 3 days.

To tell the truth, before I learned this, I bought a mother on Ebay. The lady I bought it from did not have any fantastic claims about what Kombucha can do, and also did not have any weird "other" stuff for sale in her eBay store. And what she sent was exactly what she promised. Her Ebay seller name is brinick12.

Anyway, the way I know you don't need to get a mother if you have live Kombucha is that I finished a bottle of GT's, put the lid on and for some unknown reason, set it on a bookshelf and forgot about it. There was about 1/2 teaspoon left in the bottle. When I found it 2 weeks later, it had grown its own little mother.

6. TIME MANAGEMENT: Most of the people out there who tell you how to brew Kombucha must have time in their lives that doesn't show up on the calendar. (I'm thinking "time warp" that they aren't sharing with us) They tell you to make your new batch the day you bottle your old. I just don't have time to do that. By "that", I mean:

·       Bringing 5 - 9 quarts of water to a boil and letting it cool enough (depending on whether you are bottling 1 or 2 gallons)

·       Making a pot of hot tea and letting it cool.

·       Arranging and being in the kitchen for all the time it takes to do all that at one time.  If you do any of what we call "living" while you are making the tea, you have to re-clean the kitchen for each phase.

I came up with a way that respects my time and I start the new batch's work the day before I bottle the old. I mean, if I need 3 gallons of water, boiled for 5 minutes to be at room temperature when I bottle, we're talking a few hours.  I did that once, got indignant and re-engineered the process. 

·       I have a 6-gallon, lidded stockpot. The day before I am going to bottle, I boil 4 gallons of water, put the top on and let it cool.

·       The next day when I am brewing, I already have purified water that has cooled.

·       Before I start bottling a gallon, I put tea in the sanitized pot and pour in enough boiling water for one pot of tea and put the cosy on the pot.

·       Then while I am bottling, the tea for the new gallon is steeping. As I finish bottling a gallon, I rinse and purify the jar

·       Then I fill it with three quarts of cool, purified water and strain the tea into the jar.

·       By a happy coincidence, the jar ends up being about body-temperature when you mix the hot tea and cool water. That is about the right temp for putting in the raw Kombucha or a mother (of which you will have plenty when you have been brewing for about 6 weeks. If you have one, you can cut it in half. I gave my mom 1/2 of the first one I had).

·       Cover with cheesecloth (which I get at the homebrew supply) and secure with a rubber-band then repeat the whole process for the next gallon.

·       I have 1-3 going at any given time.  That is, I might have 1 a week old, 1 2 weeks old and 1 just started, when I bottle the Kombucha.  If I am making it for friends, they supply the bottles (I reuse the ones from the commercial product I buy), but I supply space in my living room.    

·       As to space, if you are bottling just for you, once you get going, you will be able to bottle a gallon every other week.  That's 8 pints.  More than enough for me for 2 weeks.

7. Immaculately clean bottles and equipment: Back in the day, I used to brew beer and so had a familiarity with the inside of a home-brew supply shop. The one in your area might not know what Kombucha is (in Austin, they knew exactly and steered me right).

What they will know about is a process that requires immaculately clean equipment and storage vessels. They sold me a very inexpensive oxygen-based sanitizing powder. When I am getting ready to brew, I scrub the sinks, fill one with very hot water plus a few tablespoons of the sanitizing stuff and stir it around.  I close the other sink and swish a cup of the sanitizing solution through it and let it drain.  Then I put all my bottles and caps into the filled sink. What they sold me needs only 30 seconds of contact and does not need to be rinsed, since it is O2-based rather than Chlorine-based. I just pull out the bottles, drain them and set them on the counter to dry, which they do very quickly, being hot. I find it easier to put all the caps into a (sanitized) container on the counter so they are at hand but not tumbling all over the place and off onto the floor.

8. Transferring liquid from gallon jar to pint bottle. I pour a quart of the fermented mix into a Pyrex measuring cup with a pouring spout. Of course, the cup has been sanitized and I leave it in the sink of hot sanitizer between gallons. From there it is easy to pour into the pint bottles. I tighten the cap and put them on the shelf for a week or so before they go in the fridge.

9. Labeling:  I hand write labels with the tea and date bottled. If I haven't quite finished drinking a batch when I make the new, I make sure the older is handier to the front of the fridge.

If I have confused anything, I am confident that you can surf and find out what I mixed up.

summer in Austin now. Still in the 80s . This really is heaven, isn't it?