Kombucha Time

ingredients for ginger kombucha

I said in my previous post that kombucha was a subject for another day.  Well, it's another day.  The fact that I even tasted kombucha was a bit of a fluke.  I was at my annual writing retreat and as one of the last ones to leave, I had the task of cleaning out the fridge.  There wasn't really much left so it wasn't a chore.  There was, however, a bottle of kombucha. The owner of the bottle pronounced it foul and said that anyone who wanted the remaining bottle could have it.  I was intrigued so I put it in the cooler and set off for home. I'm not sure how much I knew at that point, maybe that it was a fermented tea beverage and by the time it was ready to drink there was very little alcohol left in it. I stopped for lunch at a Subway and decided that instead of buying a diet pop, I would try the kombucha.

I ate the sandwich and then I took out the bottle and looked at it for a good few minutes. What if this weird concoction didn't agree with me and I ended up sick on the drive home?  I went over what little I had read, that it was supposed to be good for your gut micro-biome, that it had no more alcohol that .5% beer which I drink. If it was bottled commercially there probably wasn't anything too terrible in it. Well, bottoms up! I opened the bottle and gave it a sniff.  It didn't smell bad so I took a sip and immediately liked it. It was kind of tart and it was wonderfully fizzy. As I drove the other 5 hours to get home I found myself wishing that I had another bottle of it in the car.

When I got home I began to do more research online.  I didn't feel quite up to making my own so I looked around to see if there was anywhere in Calgary I could get it.  Turned out that  a market not that far away from my house was beginning to sell True Buch kombucha on tap. The first time you go, you buy a bottle and then bring it back for refills. I started with a  2 litre jug or growler.  It wasn't long before I bought a second growler.  Then I bought a litre bottle so that I'd still have some kombucha when I'd emptied the 2 growlers. I limited myself to one glass of kombucha a day. I would like to have drunk more but I could really have burned through the money if I didn't put some kind of a limit on my intake.

About every 2 weeks I'd return to get the growlers filled. There were all sorts of different flavours offered but my favourite was ginger.  Seems like it was everyone else's favourite too since they usually had ginger plus one other flavour. In time they added another spigot and had three flavours on tap. I continued my fortnightly pilgrimage for kombucha until a friend decided to try to make her own. She obtained a scoby (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) from someone and started a batch. She reported that it tasted good and that making it was really easy. Encouraged by her success and realizing that my habit was becoming rather expensive, I decided to try making it myself.

First I needed a scoby. Some websites said you could use part of a bottle of commercial  kombucha to start your own brew but others discouraged that. I looked online and  found Karma Cultures.  They not only had scobies, they also had kombucha starter kits with everything you would need to get going.  I ordered a starter kit.

It was a frigid day in January when the scoby arrived in the mail and I wasn't home until late afternoon. The scoby, whose name is Violet, (I'm being absolutely serious here: she came with that name) had ice crystals in the bag and the liquid was more the consistency of gelatine than of tea. I worried that I had killed her before I even tried my first batch.  Turns out, Violent is one tough little organism.  Even though I did a whole bunch of things wrong she survived and produced a batch of kombucha with the proper PH balance in about a week.  Since ginger is my favourite I grated up a bunch of ginger root and boiled it.  Then I strained it and added sugar to the remaining liquid in order to do a secondary fermentation. One thing you must attend to when making kombucha is to make sure to "burp" the kombucha once it's in the bottles.

Violet at work

During the initial fermentation Violet does her thing in a large jar full of sweet tea.  The jar doesn't have a lid but is covered with a tightly woven cloth with an elastic that holds it onto the neck of the jar. Violet needs caffeine, sugar, and air in order to work her magic.  Although Violet is back in her jar working on another batch by the time the first one gets bottled, there are still small bits of scoby in the bottles and they work to produce carbon dioxide. If you forget to burp the bottles the pressure can build up enough that you end up cleaning kombucha off the ceiling. I've never had to do that, knock wood, but the dear friend who first started me down the kombucha route has had 2 explosions, both quite spectacular.  When the level of fizz reaches a point I'm happy with I put the bottles in the fridge and that slows down the carbon dioxide production.

At first I tasted the kombucha every day after about day 2 and then checked the PH.  Now I know it takes about a week so I usually leave Violet alone for about that long. If I'm running low it can be less than a week.  If we haven't been drinking much kombucha it can be more. I made my 34th batch of kombucha tonight. That's about 134 litres so far.

Violet is still going strong.  She is what's called the mother scoby because after a few batches she grows to a size where she can be split in two and the baby scoby can be used to start its own batch of kombucha. I divided Violet once but that made way more kombucha than we needed so I gave the baby away to a friend who now makes her own kombucha.

I could certainly divide Violet again but I just keep putting her back into the jar. I think she might work faster as she gets bigger and I may have to take part of her out and throw it into the compost if she gets too big for the jar or if she works so fast I can't keep up with her but so far so good.

So how do you make kombucha? There are many good sites with specifics but this will satisfy basic curiosity if you are still with me.

flavoured with nanking cherry juice

Make tea, either green or black.  Let it steep and remove the tea bags.  Stir in sugar until it dissolves. Add cold water so the tea won't be too hot for the scoby. Add the scoby and the starter liquid.  Cover the jar and wait. It's like making sour dough in that you reserve a portion of the kombucha to start another batch before you bottle the rest.

Sometimes I look at Violet and think oh no, I really should bottle the kombucha but not tonight.  Then the next night I have to do it or it will turn into vinegar. Even though it's a bit of a chore sometimes the effort is well worth it. I drink water and I drink regular tea but kombucha is something special and I look forward to my daily glass. When I go to a party I take kombucha with me. I'm delighted kombucha has become part of my routine and if it's good for me, so much the better.  Another thing that makes me smile is imagining what my tea-totalling father would think of his daughter fermenting tea on her kitchen counter.  Cheers, Dad.