Renegade Yogi

Kombucha experiment

I’ve been making Kombucha for a few months now. Kombucha is a fermented tea drink. It has recently become popular because you can buy it commercially in interesting flavors. Read more about it, if you like.

I just want to document my process and some experiments.

My mother first started brewing it from the solid remnants at the bottom of a commercially produced bottle of kombucha. It is important that the kombucha be alive, so those solid remnants are actually little bits of fungus and bacteria. She prepared sweetened tea (I don’t know the variety of tea nor the proportions) and added the remnants.

After three weeks, she gave me a jar of it. A very thin raft of scoby had formed at the surface of the tea. I drank the kombucha, leaving a little at the bottom.

I perpetuate the culture by adding more sweetened tea to the jar. I use Yerba Mate made from powder from the bottom of a package that would normally get thrown away (reduce waste!). I boil it in water with sugar, then let it cool, then pour it through a strainer into the jar to fill it most of the way up. I cover it with a cloth, put a rubber band around the neck, and put it in a mostly dark place for two weeks.

This time, I’ve put stevia in addition to sugar. (Stevia has traditionally been used to sweeten Yerba Mate in some countries). My hypothesis is that the stevia will not be consumed by the culture, and will leave the kombucha sweeter. We’ll see in a couple of weeks.