Fizzy kombucha magic + blends
With the spring of the year being here, we’ve been spending more and more time outside. These days , I’ve been especially enjoying taking a blanket and my work outside, along with a large glass of fizzy kombucha, and letting the sun warm my skin. It’s magical.
Today, I want to ramble about kombucha. You might have seen me sharing a post on instagram, a couple weeks ago, about different blends for the second fermentation part (yes, I might be back on the ‘grams, but don’t know how I feel about it yet and definitely am not focusing much of my attention there. My goal is still to focus elsewhere and diversify where I put my time + energy on).
So, kombucha. After posting, I started getting questions - how to brew, where to learn from, why and how has my kombucha been living on hibiscus, caffeine-free, for almost nine months?
Obviously, instagram isn’t made for long-format posting and information that can’t be meme’d or turned into slides (which is fantastic for some things, don’t get me wrong). So shall we talk about kombucha here? I’ll also go through how the heck my SCOBY isn’t drinking black tea.
First things first, for those who might not be familiar with this drink. Kombucha is a fermented probiotic drink that might have originated in China. It’s made by using a live culture - a mother, if you may, which looks like a thin, filmy, white, wet pancake called a SCOBY (symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast). The mother SCOBY feeds on black tea and sugar and produces a wee thin baby SCOBY at the same time. If you look at my jar in the picture below, you’ll see the mother (many mothers!) on the bottom of the vessel, while the new baby is floating on the top.
The same kombucha mother will inoculate an endless number of batches, and it’s extremely hardy. I’ve only managed to kill two cultures over the last 10 years, and it was because of silly mistakes. If I can care for kombucha, honestly you can too. I’m very clumsy.
Being a probiotic drink, it carries healthy bacteria and yeast, which benefit gut health (like any fermented food!, which were once a staple in our diets). I’ve recently learned, through my herbalism course, that approximately 75% of our immune system lives in the gut, which really highlights how maintaining digestive health is crucial to our body’s well-being. Pretty fascinating, uh? On top of being good for your body, it’s delicious and fizzy and you can make it at home.
There are two steps for brewing kombucha - the first and the second fermentation. The first fermentation will keep your SCOBY going and you can drink it straight out of the fermentation vessel with no bottling required. I’ve spent years drinking my kombucha like this and it’s wonderful.
If you want to kick it up a notch, you might want to to proceed to the second fermentation, which is where you add a flavoring and make some more magic happen.
Let’s talk about brewing a simple kombucha. You need to start from a live culture (I know folkx can use story-bought kombucha, buy SCOBYs online and whatnot. So many options! When I started, I did so from a SCOBY a friend handed me in a small jar with some tea in it, so that’s the only start I feel comfortable talking about).
First Fermentation
Directions
Bring your water to a boil and basically brew a saucepan full of tea. Let the tea steep for some minutes, then remove and stir in the sugar. Let it cool until warm temperature
Transfer the cooled tea to your vessel and gently slide the SCOBY in with clean hands, along with the starter tea. From this point on, don’t use metal spoons in contact with your culture.
Cover the vessel with the cloth and leave it to do its thing for 7 to 30 days, away from direct sunlight. You will notice a thin layer of baby kombucha forming on top. Well done, mama!
What you need to get started
A large vessel (I use a 6 liter jar with a tap on the bottom, but you can use a simple large jar if you want)
Tighly woven cloth to cover the jar (this will be your breathable lid) + a rubber band to secure it
Your SCOBY (+ some of its previous culture, which will help get it all started, but you can skip it if you don’t have it)
Ingredients
3 liters / 12 cups of water (we use spring or rain water)
1 cup of sugar (honey won’t do, sorry!)
8 black teabags (or 2 tablespoon of lose tea)
1 SCOBY
2 cups of starter kombucha from your previous batch
Your fermentation process will depend on the temperature of your room and climate, which is totally ok! Warmer rooms and seasons will make fermentation fast, while cold rooms and seasons will slooooow it down. Our fastest fermentation ever happened over the course of two days when we accidentally left our kombucha on a shelf next to the woodstove one winter!
So keep on tasting it throughout the process until is it just right. If it’s too sweet, allow to ferment for longer. If it’s too tart, you might have overdone it and can pass on to the second fermentation anyway, use it as vinegar, or use it to start your next batch!
When it has hit the point (and every person will have a different preferred point), you can pour it to a bottle to drink, making sure you are leaving behind around 10% of it. This remaining tea, alongside with your SCOBYs, will be the starter of your next batch. Ta-daa!
You can make your new batch on the same vessel (which I do, which is why mine has a tap - clever trick!), or transfer it to a new jar. It’s OK if your SCOBYs don’t float on top when you start a new culture. They are still there and alive, and that’s what matters.
Over time, your SCOBY will create new layers and get thicker and thicker. You can peel off the bottom layers and feed them to the compost, to the chickens or, better yet, pass them along to a friend and keep the fermentation joy going!
Right! So you have a new batch of kombucha fermenting again, and yes, the one you just poured out is good, but there’s something missing and now you have two or three bottles of it to go through. Is this it? Well, my friend, I’m glad you asked because no, this is not it and we can get (even more) creative now!
Second fermentation
Now is the time to experiment. This is also the step where your plain kombucha will become carbonated and foamy, which is is so exciting!
What you need
Different bottles that can handle pressure (flip top bottles are great for this)
Ingredients
The kombucha you just made on the first first fermentation
Flavorings of your choice (herbs, fruits, fruit juice, flowers, you name it)
Sweetener (sugar or honey. If you’re using a sweet fruit, you might not need to add any sweeteners at all)
Directions
For each bottle, I usually make 10% of the content the flavoring (and sweetner, if using), and the remaining 90% are filled with kombucha. You will want to leave some headspace
Cap the bottle and leave to ferment at room temperature for 2 - 7 days, depending on your taste, opening every day or so to release the accumulated CO2.
When it tastes perfect, with the right combination of sweetness and fizziness, you can strain it, recap it and store in the fridge (the cold temperature will keep the ferment dormant, so the bottles don’t explode). We don’t have a fridge, so we just enjoy our flavored kombucha once it’s ready. So good!
This post wouldn’t be complete without mentioning some of my favorite blends for the second fermentation, alongside with some resources.
Beware, here is my ultimate list of favorite seasonal blends so far:
WINTER
🌙 ginger + honey {this is my most favorite winter tonic - so warming!}
🌙 orange juice
SPRING
🌙 lemon + mint
🌙 wild lavender + honey
SUMMER {berry season!!}
🌙 blackberries + mint
🌙 strawberries + lemon
AUTUMN
🌙 apple + cinnamon
🌙 pear + cardamom
I think that one of the best things about kombucha, and fermentation in general, is that there is a lot of room to experiment with once you understand the basis. Which flavors work for you, which don’t, what’s the best spot in your home to ferment, how sour is too sour, what can you do with sour kombucha, how long can you keep it forgotten until it dies (spolier alert: months and months and months, maybe even a couple years).
It was this experimentation that led me to try and ditch the black tea completely.
Last summer, we were having lunch at some friends’ farm, and my friend brought the drinks to the table. There was this beautiful bottle of pinkish, orange-ish super fizzy drink, which I just couldn’t believe was kombucha. Turns out if was, and she told me she was making her kombucha with hibiscus instead of black tea altogether from the beginning. So I came home and did the same with a new batch. It’s beautiful and soft, and hard to wrap my head around. Only very recently I did some research around it, and it turns out you can migrate your well-established culture to a different type of infusion… But it will need the caffeine kick after some batches. So after roughly nine months of brewing with hibiscus, on last week’s batch I brought black tea back. It’s true, though - over the last couple of months, noticed that my batches were losing carbonation, and it’s probably related to this. So we’re back on black tea, and maybe in a couple months will be back on hibiscus, or maybe something else. I don’t know!
My advice is - experiment, experiment, experiment. And if along your experiments there is any mould, weird smells or tastes, then you know you probably did something wrong and need to start from scratch again (a good tip is to always keep some kombucha + SCOBY aside if you mess up along the way, so you already have a new batch to start from)
Now here are some resources to inspire you further!
✨ Herbal kombucha & even more herbal kombucha!
✨ Last week I discovered this website and am fascinated by all these creative flavoring ideas!
✨ This interview with Sandor Katz
✨ The Craft of Herbal Fermentation, a course I just enrolled in super recently. It covers different ferments (I’m currently in the first unit, herbal beer and ale, and can’t wait to get to the kombucha unit and actually get to understand the science behind what I’ve been doing for 10 years)
Happy brewing, friends! As always, feel free to leave me a note as a comment below or an email, and share your kitchen adventures with me <3
Until next time, may your last days of March be scrumptious x