I’ve been a home brewer since my parents gave me a homebrew kit for Christmas a month before my 21st birthday. Since I wasn’t of legal drinking age, my mother insisted that my first batch be non-alcoholic root beer, which turned out great! Fast-forward a few decades and I haven’t had the time to do any beer brewing lately, but have had the itch to get back into it. I’ve also been looking for something that a bit healthier than beer to drink on a regular basis. That’s when I started brewing Kombucha.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably already familiar with Kombucha, but for those of you who aren’t, Kombucha is a sweet and tart, slightly bubbly fermented tea beverage. It comes in loads of different flavors and is purported to be chock full of probiotics and other healthy stuff.
A few months ago, I tried Kombucha and for whatever reason, I didn’t really like it. I’m not sure why, but I gave it another shot not too long ago and this time, I was hooked. Knowing it was a fermented tea beverage, I turned to Google to see how hard it is to brew at home. Turns out it’s really easy! It’s also much cheaper to brew Kombucha at home than it is to buy bottles at the store. Most of the commercial Kombucha runs about $3 per bottle.
Brewing Overview
The first thing you need is a SCOBY. SCOBY stands for Symbiotic Colony of Yeast and Bacteria and is where the magic happens. The scoby looks (and feels) like a pancake made out of gelatin. Luckily, SCOBYs are easy to make and also available for purchase like this one . If you make your own SCOBY, you’ll need some tea, a bottle of store-bought kombucha and a quart-size mason jar.
Once you have a SCOBY, it’s a simple matter of brewing a gallon of sweet tea, adding the SCOBY and letting it sit for about a week. After a week, I bottle mine using some of the homebrew bottles I have laying around. Bottling will result in the carbonation of your Kombucha.
Check out the rest of my posts on Brewing Kombucha!
No Comments Yet