We were introduced to kombucha by drinking Dave’s Kombucha. We were in the health food store, saw a bottle and bought one. Love at first sip! Dave’s mom, Lorraine, swears kombucha helped her defeat cancer. From everything I know about curing cancer and probiotics, it fits. We started pursuing probiotics in earnest after I got out of the hospital. Almost two years later, I’m still battling the after-effects of three weeks of intense antibiotics. My gut was messed up before, no question, but that finished off any healthy flora I might have had goin’ on.

Before long, we really got a ♥ on when it came to kombucha: downing at least a bottle a day each, yelling, “OK, who drank the last kombucha???” when we discovered none left in the fridge. Addicts. We were either going to go broke feeding our habit or we had to start making our own. So I watched a couple of videos, read a how-to, asked around and a friend brought me a SCOBY.

SCOBYs are GROSS, btw. Here’s a picture of my
two 5-gallon continuous brew kombucha tea (kt) jugs:

Told ya. Gross. Like a big skanky mushroom (the “mother”) with fungus growing off the bottom (the “daughter”). Yeah, we drink that. In fact, we can’t wait to drink that!!!

So I took my friend’s SCOBY, made a gallon of sweet green tea, and tossed it all in a big 1-gallon glass jar ($12.99 at Amazon). I wanted to try growing my own SCOBY, too, so I also bought a bottle of Dave’s Original Raw (unflavored) Kombucha and poured that in another gallon glass jar with sweet green tea. Then I waited. Two weeks later, my friend’s SCOBY had turned the sweet tea to a smelly vinegary kombucha — exactly like it’s supposed to do!

In the other jar, the Dave’s SCOBY was slowing but surely forming. Way cool food science: bacteria forming a thin layer of SCOBY on the top of the tea. [Took another month for this tea to ferment, but it did and now that SCOBY is just as big and gross as the first one.] See? I can cook.

How to Make Kombucha: Overview

1. Ferment sweet tea using a SCOBY
2. Drink as is or…
3. Flavor, bottle and do a second ferment
4. Chill and drink. Tada!

Here’s our recipe for the sweet tea:

How to Make Kombucha Part I: Sweet Tea for 1rst Ferment

Ingredients
22 grams (4.5 tsp.) of tea — we use green or pu’erh from Mountain Rose Herbs
1.5 C sugar
1 Gallon of filtered water (we ♥ our Big Berkey)
1 half-gallon Mason jar
1 Muslin bag (also from Mountain Rose Herbs)

Recipe
Boil some of the water — you don’t have to boil all of it now. That would make this process REALLY time-consuming and expensive if you had to boil a gallon of water. You’re essentially making really strong tea, then will dilute it when you pour into the brew jar. I boil water in my stainless steel electric water kettle (it’s 1.5 liters so just shy of 1/2 gallon).

While the water is boiling, put the sugar and tea in a pan. If you have a glass pan, great. Kombucha purists never allow steel to touch their brew. I use a 2 Qt stainless saucepan. My next cookware will be glass.

When the water boils in my kettle (less than five minutes), I pour that over the sugar and tea in the pot, and stir with a bamboo spoon. The sugar melts right away.

Let it steep or turn on the heat and boil for about 10 minutes, then strain the tea. I strain by pouring through a muslin bag into the half gallon mason jar, then add enough water to fill the jar.

Let it cool. Once the tea is room temp, pour the tea into the brew jar, then re-fill the Mason jar with filtered water and add that to the brew jar. If your SCOBY is not already in there, go ahead and add it.

Cover with a tea towel and a rubber band to keep the bugs out. Bugs LOVE kombucha!

When the ph reaches 3 or so (our benchmark was 3.2), your first ferment is done!

We don’t test the ph anymore; our continuous brew is reliable at this point. After a few batches, you’ll know when yours is ready by the smell and taste.

You can drink it right now if you like — lots of people do. Or you can flavor and do a 2nd ferment. We flavor! Adding flavor requires a second ferment to eat up the sugar in the flavoring. We add ginger and frozen grape juice, but flavoring ideas are endless. Here’s how we get our delicious life-sustaining kombucha:

How To Make Kombucha Part II: Flavor, Bottle, 2nd Ferment

This will turn your vinegary kt into 8 16-oz bottles of delicious homemade ginger/grape kombucha!

Ingredients
1 Gallon fermented kt
Two 1/2-gallon Mason jars
Chunk of raw unpeeled ginger
1 can frozen grape juice
2 Muslin bags
8 16-oz bottles with tight-fitting caps

Recipe
1. Fill the Mason jars with kt. [NOTE: you could also just take the SCOBY out of the brew jar and flavor in there. Just set the SCOBY aside in a bowl for now. Once you've flavored and bottled your kt, wash out the brew jar, make a fresh batch of tea, start over!]

2. Add ginger. You can do this one of two ways:

a. My way: Chop up a big chunk of raw unpeeled ginger (we use the Cuisinart) and put half in two muslin bags (one for each Mason jar of kt). Dunk the bags in the kt and let sit for 30 minutes. Then pull out the bags and squeeze them dry into the kombucha — I love watching the ginger juice go into my kt!

b. Hal’s way: don’t do ginger now, do grape juice now (#3), then bottle (#4), THEN drop 2-3 pieces of candied ginger in each bottle just before closing. The ginger falls out in your glass while you are drinking your kt. You can toss or eat!

3. Add 1/4 to 1/2 can of frozen grape juice to each jar. Hal will use 1/2 can per (sweeter result), I’ll use 1/4 can per (more tart result). It’s up to you. [DETAILS: If you are going to do a shorter ferment, use less juice or the kt will be very sweet and not fizzy. The shorter the ferment, the less sweet you want to add. If you are battling candida or any bugs, sugar feeds the baddies so you'll want the result to be more tart. By the same token, you need some sweet because sugar is what feeds the ferment. Isn't it ironic that sugar feeds both the good and the bad bacteria? You'll get the hang of it. Hey, it's practically free. Experiment!]

4. Fill 8 bottles with the flavored kt. We had a zillion Dave’s KT bottles and used to use those. But then our friend Robert of the Badgetts sent us a case of beer making bottles and we are ever so grateful. Those babies really get a good seal going and that’s what a ferment needs! Tight seal is the key, no matter what bottles you are using. Don’t fill the bottles too full or else you’ll taste the rubber used in the seal. Yuck.

5. OK: time for the second ferment. Put the bottles on a kitchen shelf for 3 days to a couple of weeks, just depending on how fast you are drinking it and how much back up you have. I’ve had a bottle as early as the next day (which was too sweet for me.) And we’ve had them weeks after — always good! We’ve yet to have kombucha that was “too old”… I don’t know that there is such a thing. I mean, how can it spoil? It’s already “gone bad”, lol!

WARNING: some people have had bottles burst during the second ferment, so at first I used a plastic bin or a cardboard box for this part. But nothing ever burst so now I just put them on the shelf.

6. Once the second ferment is done to your liking, transfer the bottles to the fridge. You’ll learn how fast or slow that 2nd ferment takes in your kitchen by trial and error. Basically, the longer the ferment, the more sugar is eaten up and the more tart the finished product. We don’t have a big fridge, so we try to keep 3-4 bottles in the fridge at all times.

I swear something happens in the fridge, something that adds to the fizz because it’s always fizzier after a day in the cold. No clue why. And I basically don’t care why… it’s so good, I’m not going to mess with delicious success!

This jar is full of SCOBY. It appears my natural talent is growing SCOBY. Who knew? If you want some, donate $20 via Paypal to saratica[@]gmail[.]com. Email  me your address and I’ll send it out to you. Yeah, this is part of my Get Rich R-E-A-L-L-Y Slowly Scheme. Don’t knock it. It seems to be working.

Or buy a bottle of Dave’s Raw Original Kombucha and pour it into a gallon of sweet tea. Trust me, SCOBY happens!

P.S. Sometimes we open a bottle from the fridge and discover a baby SCOBY floating on the top. You can strain before you drink. But, heck, we’ve all swallowed plenty of baby SCOBY and still standing!