I Made Kombucha!

16 June 2017


Have you had kombucha before? I think the first time I tried it I was a little weirded out by it. I mean, fermented tea? But lately I've been really getting into it! Surprisingly though made from tea, it doesn't taste like tea. More tangy and fizzy and it's SO good for you. The downside of kombucha is that it's pretty expensive to buy. About $4-5 a serving. Pretty pricey! So (as per usual) I decided to try making my own.

Well, I looked into it. Then I realized why some people are really weirded out by kombucha. One word: SCOBY. Don't google it. Just don't! It's really gross. But it's the key to making kombucha! The scoby is pretty much a goopy little colony for yeast and good bacteria that changes sweetened tea to fizzy tangy kombucha.

So I got over the whole scoby thing and found that a friend on Instagram (thanks Faith!) had a scoby she could give me. Like most things I've been getting into the past while (hello quilting, cob ovens, chickens, babies etc) it seemed a little overwhelming when I first read about it. But one night after the kids went to bed, I watched a few youtube videos and just dove in.

Turns out kombucha is the easiest thing to make. SO EASY. If you have a scoby, can wash your hands, and brew tea you can make kombucha. After I let it ferment (read: sit in the pantry undisturbed) for a week, I scooped out my scoby, which had grown another goopy layer (yum!), and put it in a jar with some of the fermented tea. I can use it again for the next round of kombucha making. I decided to flavour mine and took the extra step of adding some fruit and letting it ferment for another 2 days to build the flavour a bit more and add more carbonation (the bacteria feeds off the sugar in the added fruit and produces gas aka carbonation). After that, I just popped it in the fridge to stop the fermentation and wait for us to drink it!

Yum! For my first batch I just used some good ole Yorkshire Gold black tea that I had in the pantry already and after I divided the kombucha up I added blueberries, ginger, and mango to them. Not gonna lie, I was a bit nervous to drink it. Fermenting is kinda just a fancy was of saying edible mold (right?!) and it's hard to get used to consuming something that you've left out for a week with a bacteria blob floating in there. But what do you know, it's really quite good! Even Iris loves it! Score!

Since originally writing this post 2 weeks ago, I accidentally dropped my entire batch of kombucha (scoby and all) on the kitchen floor. BAH! So I had to start all over with new scobies in a new container. I ended up getting a large ceramic crock-type one with a spigot so now I'm making kombucha on tap pretty much. It's great. 



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