Homemade Kombucha – Why Aren’t You Making Your Own?
Let’s make some kombucha!
Before I dig into it, I want to lay out for you my top three reasons why you should be making your own kombucha.
1) You’ll save a ton. Most commercially available kombuchas are really expensive. You’ll be looking to pay anywhere from about $3 to upwards of $7 for a bottle of this stuff. Good news is that you can make it for pennies. You’ll get gallons of homemade kombucha for the full retail price of just one bottle. Now, I’m not saying you have to stop buying kombucha at the store. I like to buy them to try out new flavors before I try making them at home. Also, some of the commercially available ones have flavors that I just can’t readily get my hands on. So, we splurge on a fancy kombucha every now and then.
2) You’ll be growing your own custom scoby. Scoby stands for Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast. Scoby is the organism that turns your tea into kombucha. When you start brewing your own kombucha, you start growing your own scoby as well. You will start with someone else’s scoby, but over time, it will differentiate itself and develop its own identity. The microorganisms in your scoby will be an expression of your particular situation. Your specific environment, temperature, tea, sugar and time will produce a one-of-a-kind scoby that makes one-of-a-kind kombucha. Basically, you are creating a custom strand of probiotics, b-vitamins and organic acids. Now that’s cool.
3) It is super easy. I mean, it is so easy that a busy family of four can make it without much fuss. We spend about 30 minutes every other weekend making our own kombucha. Much of that time is waiting on the tea to cool down enough to add to the jug. Reality is that there are only a handful of minutes of actual work that goes into making kombucha. If you can boil water and stir, you have what it takes to be a kombucha all-star.
Now, how do you actually make this stuff? A quick search online yields hundreds of articles and videos on how to make kombucha. If that’s the case, then why not just google it? Why continue to read? Well, I’m going to give you a few little secrets that we use to save time and hassle.
First of all, we use the continual/continuous brew method. That saves a bunch of time. You have less to sanitize, less to handle and generally less to mess with.
First of all, a big part of making kombucha is making sure you are growing your scoby and not other bad bacteria, yeast or molds. Those make for a bad time. So, you want to start with sanitized jars, jugs and utensils. This is done easily enough with boiling water. We simply fill our jugs with boiling water, cover them with a clean towel and let the hot water kill everything. We do the same to our stir sticks, lids, and anything else we might be using. With the continuous brew method, we turn a sun tea jug into a miniature “clean room.” As long as we pay close attention to what we are doing, we do not have to re-sterilize the jug every time. That saves time.
Next, to save even more time, we opt for a longer brew time and skip the second ferment. Many kombucha home-brewers do two ferments on their kombucha. The first one is done in a large vessel. The second one is done in the individual bottle. So, traditionally, you brew a large batch of plain kombucha. Then, after a week or so of fermentation, you put it in individual bottles along with whatever you are going to flavor it with and a pinch of extra sugar. For example, after you ferment your tea in the big jug, you pour it into a bottle with some ginger, scoop of mashed blueberries and a pinch of sugar. You seal the lid tightly and put it in a dark place to ferment for another week or so. Your finished product is a bottle of fizzy blueberry-ginger kombucha.
That’s nice and all, but my family ain’t got time for that.
Honestly, we rarely just drink kombucha for the sake of drinking kombucha. Most of the time we are using the kombucha as one ingredient in a larger concoction. For example, I like to add kombucha to my smoothies. We will sometimes mix the kids a drink of carrot juice, kombucha and some other vitamin or supplement, like collagen. We have made kombucha gummies and pops. I have added kombucha to other tea to take it up a notch or two. Instead of flavoring in the bottle and waiting, we just add the flavoring agents directly to the glass then add the kombucha and drink it. So, rather than taking time to sterilize and fill all those individual bottles, we just fill a large gallon-sized glass jug and keep it in the fridge. Granted, we lose out on the carbonation. But that is a small price we are willing to pay.
So, without further ado, here is how we make continuous brew kombucha at our house:
Large vessel to brew your tea in (we use half-gallon Mason jars)
Filtered water or Spring water (Use water without Chorine or Fluoride in it. Those will kill your scoby.)
Wooden or plastic stirring spoon
Rubber bands or sun tea jar lid
Kettle or pot to boil your water in
Gallon sized glass jar (to store the finished ‘bucha in)
1) Sanitize everything. As stated previously, we use boiling water to sanitize our stuff. Don’t forget to run some boiling water through the spout of the sun tea jar.
2) Bring a full tea kettles worth of spring or filtered water to a boil.
3) Add 2/3 cup of sugar to each half-gallon jar (or whatever vessel you are brewing the tea in).
4) Once that water boils, pour it over the sugar and stir until dissolved. I try not to fill the jars more than half-way with the boiling water.
5) Add 4 tea bags to each jar. (That is to say, we use 8 tea bags per gallon of water. You need to make it strong.)
6) Once the tea bags begin to steep, fill the jar the rest of the way with room temperature filtered/spring water.
7) Cover the top opening with a clean towel to keep stuff out while it brews. Let it brew until it is very dark. You want it to be super strong. (We let it go for at least 30 minutes, sometimes more than an hour. If you make your tea in the morning, you can let it brew until you get home in the evening. The point is, make it strong and let it cool to room temperature.)
Note: If you don’t have a scoby, you can use a plain flavored store-bought kombucha as a starter. That is to say, buy a plain (unpasteurized, if possible) kombucha that has the brown stuff in the bottom of the jar. That brown stuff is bits of scoby. It will eventually grow into a full scoby for you. This is what we did. Just know that it will take a little bit longer for your very first brew to finish if you are using plain kombucha as a starter.
8) Add your scoby (or starter kombucha) to your clean and sterilized sun tea jar.
9) Fill the jar with your strong sweet tea, leaving at least an inch at the top.
10) Wipe the rim of the sun tea jug with a clean towel. (I generally use a bit of boiling water on a paper towel to clean up the rim.)
11) Cover lid opening with two clean coffee filters. Hold them in place with either rubber bands (my preferred method) or screw the sun tea lid on, making sure to leave the spout open. (Just rip that little lid off.) The scoby will need to “breath” a little in order to turn your tea into kombucha. The filters also keep unwanted stuff out. I double up on the filters so I can throw the top one away, should I see anything unwanted touch it.
12) Store out of direct sunlight at room temperature. We put ours on top of our fridge in the back. The temperature is pretty stable there. Stable temperature makes for predicable ferments.
13) We let it brew for two weeks. You’ll know it is done when the liquid goes from dark brown to light yellowy tan. Also, you’ll see that your scoby had grown bigger. The longer it ferments, the more vinegary it will taste. My kids call this “hot bucha.” They love it. The shorter it ferments, the sweeter it will taste. Experiment with it and you’ll figure out what you like best.
14) We pull the sun tea jar down to the counter, hanging the spout over the edge. We then fill our sanitized glass gallon jar. (You can use a funnel, just make sure it is sanitized, too.)
Note: The spout for the jug is about an inch from the bottom of the sun tea jar. This means enough kombucha is retained to keep your scoby going and provide some batch-to-batch consistency.
15) Make more strong sweet tea (repeat Steps 1-7).
16) When cool, remove the coffee filters and pour the tea into the sun tea jar. (Steps 8 & 9)
17) Wipe the lid clean again, cover and put it back up on your fridge (or wherever) to ferment. (Steps 10-13)
Note: Your spout can get junked up with scoby and dangly bits. To keep bad things from growing, I wipe the spout off, as needed, with a towel or paper towel that has been dipped in boiling water.
Making kombucha at home is easy. You should not hesitate to try making it. Also, know that this is a scalable operation. Right now, we are making two gallons worth every two weeks. (Two sun tea jars.) Our production might have to go up from there as our kids are growing and taking larger and larger servings.
If you have any questions, we are here to help.
If you do make it, send us a photo or a short snippet letting us know what you think about your home brew. We can’t wait to hear about it.
