We all begin w/ homebrew...
You can make your own kombucha! People have been making homemade kombucha for hundreds of years. Homemade kombucha became popular in the USA in the 1990's. Ask around, you probably know someone or their mother who used to brew it themselves.
a lovely House SCOBY
1. Get your own SCOBY!
At House Kombucha we don't sell our Babies, but you can usually find them on Craigslist, order them online or ask a friend with a homebrew for one. You can even culture your own by leaving adding a cup of Sweet Tea to a cup of fresh kombucha and leaving it undisturbed for several weeks
2. Make a Sweet Tea.
You can use any kind of natural tea to make kombucha. The SCOBY feeds off the properties of tea. Because the SCOBY is alive, it is best to not use tea that has been treated with chemicals or oils. Check to make sure that the tea you use is pure and doesn't have any mysterious additives like “natural flavours” in the ingredients. Oils and flavors may stunt or alter your SCOBY. Boil up a strong batch of tea and add a natural sweetener to the hot tea and let it cool to room temperature. A good ratio is 1 cup sugar per gallon of tea.
3. Add Starter
The kombucha liquid must be kept at pH levels between 4 and 2.5. Regular water is neutral with a pH of 7. Starter is required to make the generally neutral sweet tea more acidic. A very sour kombucha is the best starter, but if you don't have an overly fermented kombucha at hand, you can use a bottle of commercially produced kombucha. Whatever starter you use may affect the flavor of your final brew. Depending on how sour your starter is, your final brew may consist of 80% Swet Tea and 20% Starter liquid. Because the sugar can mask the true acidity of the Final Brew, pH strips are useful to keeping a consistent pH.
4. Leave it alone for 7 days.
Once you have your final brew cooled to room temperature, place your SCOBY in the liquid and cover it with a piece of cloth and seal the cloth around the container with a big rubber band to keep fruit flies out of it. Leave the batch in a dark room, undisturbed for 7 days at or around 80 degrees. If you are using a container with a spigot, you can taste it periodically without disturbing the SCOBY. Depending the on size and vitality of you SCOBY, your brew could ferment faster or slower than you expect. Be careful not to over ferment it because if it becomes too acidic it will become too sour, taste bad and, in large doses, may cause stomach upset.
5. Storage.
Once your kombucha tastes perfect, fill up your serving containers to the brim and seal them. You can leave them at room temperature in sturdy glass bottles for up to a week to get the kombucha to be extra fizzy. This process is called Secondary Fermentation. Be careful to use a airlock top or put a balloon over the top because glass can break under the pressure that builds during this process. Also, some alcohol is formed during the 2nd Fermentation so if you're sensitive to alcohol, consider foregoing this step (we skip this step).
6. Prepare for your next batch!
Leave a couple cups of kombucha in your fermenting container to keep the SCOBY company until you brew up another batch of Sweet Tea. This leftover kombucha will become very sour within 12 hours of leaving it with the SCOBY and be good to use as Starter for the next batch. It is best to start brewing new tea as soon as you finish each batch. Routine kombucha streaming and brewing will prevent contamination and keep your SCOBY alive and healthy.
Tips: you can play with the balance of sweet/tart by following these principles
- Higher levels of Starter levels will lead to decreased fermentation time, OR increased sourness of finished brew.
- Longer fermentation -> more sour
- More sugar = longer fermentation required, which = more sour OR sweeter brew that might not taste "finished"
- Add juice, sweeteners afterward if you want a sweeter kombucha that tastes fully fermented.