Probably the most popular question I’m getting in the comments, to my email box, and as as search time people are finding this site with, is ‘does my SCOBY have mold?’ or ‘Is my SCOBY bad?’ IF you’ve followed the brewing instructions correctly — you’ve made a sweet tea mix and adding about half a…
It Gets Very Hot Where I Live – What Can I Do? If you live in an area where it is very hot all year round, or where temperatures in the summer can get very hot, then you might be experiencing some problems with you kombucha brewing. It is not impossible to produce good ferments…
My Kombucha Seems to Be Attracting Hoards of Fruit Flies….. Help! Fruit flies (or vinegar flies) LOVE kombucha. They can pop up and appear out of the blue, to hang around your kitchen relentlessly. No matter if your brewing tea batch is securely covered and there is no way that they can get into the…
One of the most important variables you need to control when fermenting Kombucha is the temperature. Temperature affects three things: While brewing at the best temperature is not the ONLY thing that will affect your Kombucha flavor profile, it’s also one of the most important AND easiest variable to control. To control your brewing temperature, read…
Once you have the basic equipment for brewing kombucha and you know the right ingredients to use for kombucha, all you need to do is mix those ingredients together using that equipment, and voila! You have delicious kombucha tea. Well, there are a few other things you have to keep in mind, of course: But good kombucha and a healthy SCOBY…
To keep your kombucha SCOBY healthy, you need to give it three things: a safe place to live (like a SCOBY hotel), enough oxygen to breath, and the right food to eat. And what a SCOBY likes best to eat is a sugary liquid made with the caffeine-rich leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant, the ancient Chinese tea…
When you make kombucha tea you give the microorganisms in the SCOBY (the Symbiotic Colony Of Bacteria and Yeast) a “wake-up” drink of fresh, strong, sweet tea that kick-starts the yeast into action, and starts the fermentation process. The yeasts and bacteria use the sugar as food as they process the caffeine and other nutrients and phytochemicals…
If you want to get experimental with your Kombucha, one of the easiest ways is to substitute the regular sugar ingredient during the primary fermentation with alternative sugar sources. You can swap sugar for Molasses, Honey, Maple Syrup, raw sugars, and even Agave Nectar. Changing up the sugar source to something that’s not common ‘sugar’ is part of…
High-fructose corn syrup! Obesity! Sugar kills! You’ll see a lot of anti-sugar hype in the media, and there’s a grain (or a crystal) of truth in almost all of the claims. In fact, there are many very good reasons to cut back on sugar consumption, ranging from the environmental and human impact of the sugar…
Brew Kombucha without sugar using fruit instead? Yes – it’s possible to completely replace sugar with fruit during your primary fermentation. For those who want to approach Kombucha making in as natural a method as possible, this method of flavoring (without sugar) is particularly appealing. You also get a uniquely strong flavored Kombucha. Make sure…