I make the stuff from time to time, and I’m sending a daughter home with a SCOBY and directions, so I figured I might as well post them, in case anybody else is interested.
Kombucha is a tart, fizzy, slightly fermented tea. (With negligible alcohol.) I don’t endorse any of the health claims about it. I drink it because I don’t like soda, I can’t drink caffeine, and I can’t be drinking beer all the time! (I make my Kombucha with decaf tea.)
Here are the instructions to make your first batch at home — assuming you have a SCOBY. If you don’t, you can get one from a friend, buy one, or even grow one yourself, which I won’t explain here.
- Go buy a bottle of commercial kombucha. The plainer the better. Don’t drink it. You’ll want to add 2 cups of kombucha to every batch to keep the pH low. For your first batch, you’ll have to use somebody else’s kombucha. For future batches, you’ll use your own. Some people say you can use vinegar for this. Don’t do it.
- Boil 4 cups of water and dissolve one cup of sugar in the water. When it comes to a boil, take it off the heat and add about 8 regular black tea bags. Not flavored teas. Not Earl Grey. Not herbal tea. Not green tea. Just regular black tea. (I use decaf black tea.) Let the tea steep and cool for 10-15 minutes.
- While that is steeping, disinfect your kombucha jar with a bleach solution — 1 Tablespoon of bleach / gallon of water.
- Add 6 cups of very cold water and the bottle of commercial kombucha to your sanitized glass jar.
- Remove your tea bags and add the tea to your jar. Pour it down the center directly into the cold water so that it does not come in contact with the glass. It’s probably not a big deal, but you don’t want to make glass change temperature rapidly, so pouring it into the cold water should be okay.
- Add the SCOBY and the liquid it’s in.
- Fill up the jar with cold water, leaving about an inch of room at the top.
- Set a clean cloth on top of the jar and attach it with a rubber band. This is to keep out dust and insects and so on, but to allow CO2 to escape. If you’re a homebrewer, you might be tempted to use an air lock. That doesn’t seem to work as well. I think this strange brew requires bacteria and such from the air.
- Let it sit for 10 days or so. The longer it sits, the more tart / sour it will become.
Every time you want to bottle kombucha, you also make a new batch. So we’ll repeat some of the steps above, but we’ll include bottling this time.
You’ll need enough bottles to hold 1 gallon of liquid. I recommend 8 16 oz. PET bottles with screw-up tops, but you can also use flip-top beer bottles, like Grolsch uses. The benefit of PET is that if you’re not careful with the carbonation and the bottles explode, you don’t have sharp glass flying all over the place. I’ve never had a bottle of kombucha explode, but better safe than sorry, I say.
It’s a good idea to have a kombucha jar for fermenting, and a second jar with a spigot for bottling. You might be tempted to think you can do this with just one jar with a spigot. I recommend two jars.
- Boil 4 cups of water and dissolve one cup of sugar in the water. When it comes to a boil, take it off the heat and add about 8 regular black tea bags. Let the tea steep and cool for 10-15 minutes.
- Sanitize your bottling bucket with a solution of 1 T bleach / gallon of water.
- Sanitize all your bottles and caps. I do this by rinsing out the bottles with water, pouring some of the sanitizing solution into each bottle, shaking it up, pouring it out, and letting it drain in the drying rack. If you don’t have a drying rack, use your dishwasher rack. Reserve a couple cups of the sanitizing solution for later.
- Drain and rinse your bottling bucket.
- Open up your kombucha jar and use some grabbers to remove the scoby. Set it on a clean plate.
- Carefully pour your kombucha into your bottling bucket. Tap off 2 cups and reserve it for later.
- Add two cups of some sort of juice to your bottling bucket. I like to use cranberry juice, but you can experiment. I wouldn’t use orange juice. I’m sure you can also use some sort of strong, sweet infusion — with ginger, for example — but you’d have to make sure it has the right amount of sugar. I’m not sure what that would be.
- Fill each of your sanitized bottles with kombucha to about an inch from the top and cap. Store them at room temperature for a week or so, until they’re carbonated, then refrigerate them after that. This is another reason why PET bottles are useful. You can tell if the kombucha is carbonated when the bottle gets hard.
- Rinse out your kombucha jar and sanitize it with the 2 cups of sanitizing solution you reserved earlier. Rinse out the bleach.
- Add to your sanitized kombucha jar 6 cups of very cold water and the 2 cups of kombucha you reserved earlier.
- Remove your tea bags and add the tea to your jar.
- Add the SCOBY.
- Fill up the jar with cold water, leaving about an inch of room at the top.
- Set the cloth on top of the jar and attach it with a rubber band.
- Let it sit for 2 weeks, etc.