Kombucha

Kombucha is fermented tea. It is made from tea with sugar and fermented by adding SCOBY (Symbiotic Colony Of Bacteria and Yeast).
It tastes great (not for everybody) and it is pro-biotic, which means that it is good for your health. I love it and drink a bit every day.

Here is how I make my Kombucha drink. I use a 1 gallon (3.6 L) glass container.

3L of filtered water, 1 cup sugar, 7 tea bags.

Ingredients:
 - 3 L of filtered water (room temperature in a 1 gallon glass jar)
 - 7 tea bags (I use green tea, sometime mixed with red tea)
 - 1 cup sugar
 - 1 cup kombucha
 - Scoby

One cup of kombucha and scoby (from previous batch) to be added to the new sweet tea.

Steps:
1. Boil part of the 3 L filtered water (about 1 L), steep the tea bags in it for 10 to 15 minutes.
2. Add 1 cup of sugar to the hot tea, and stir until all the sugar dissolved.
3. Put this sweet tea liquid back in the glass jar to make 3 L of tea, and stir.
4. Let this 3 L of sweet tea cool down to room temperature (about 3 hours or more).
5. Add 1 cup of kombucha and stir.
6. Add the Scoby.
7. Cover the glass jar with a tight woven cloth and leave at room temperature for 10 to 15 days.
8. After 10 days taste if it is done the way you like it, and prepare for the next batch.
9. Bottled the finish product (filtered with fine plastic filter) and let it sit (tightly cap) for another 2 days at room temperature before storing it in the fridge.

The kombucha left some residue (from scoby).

Notes:

Use filtered water to avoid chlorine, fluoride and other contaminants that are not good for the bacterias.

Heat may kill the scoby, so make sure that the tea is cooled to room temperature before adding the scoby and one cup of kombucha into it. The scoby is alive and grows if well fed and taken care of, so treat it as a pet.

Initially you need a starter scoby and one cup of kombucha. For the next batch, you use (move) the scoby from the first batch. As the scoby multiplies you can make more batches or share with others.

Green tea is my favourite, but sometimes I mix one red tea bag with 6 green tea bags.

White sugar, palm sugar, demera cane sugar etc are all fine to use. They all give good results. Just different taste.

Use a tightly woven cloth to cover the glass jar during fermentation to prevent fruit flies entering, but still allows air to move. Use a fresh/clean cloth for the next batch, do not use the same cloth from the previous batch as it may have fruit fly eggs on it.

Some tiny scoby or tea leaves may be floating around in the finish product, so it is best to filter the kombucha into bottles. 

Leaving the finished kombucha in tightly cap bottles out in room temperature for another 2 days before putting in the fridge, will make it 'fizzy', as it continues to ferment. 

Kombucha as other fermented food has lots of good bacterias, but it also has a special yeast that can not be killed by antibiotics. It is Saccharomyces boulardii. This special yeast is abundant in kombucha and it is now use to treat serious diarrhea and other gastrointestinal disorders.

If you are going away for an extended vacation, you can store the scoby immersed in sweet tea inside the fridge for several weeks.



Please leave comments or questions, below. Hope you find it useful.