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It’s everywhere, it’s excellent for your gut health, and it is definitely the hip drink of the decade. So, join me, why don’t you, in my latest money-saving adventure: a recipe for homemade booch, teeming with probiotics. To brew kombucha, you first need a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast. It also goes by the quietly imposing name of mother. There are several suppliers from whom you can purchase a full-size SCOBY, but what’s the fun in that?
To cultivate your own mother, you’re going to buy a bottle of good quality, unflavored, unpasteurized, raw kombucha. A trusted source recommended the brand Health-Ade, and I had excellent SCOBY-growing luck with their bottles of small-batch brews. Any brand will work, so long as it’s raw and unpasteurized. If you’ve read my sourdough recipe, you know just how much I like to wait for my food. For your SCOBY to develop, you will need to wait anywhere from 1 week to 4 weeks. There are two stages of fermentation when it comes to brewing kombucha.
The first stage occurs in your SCOBY jar and the tea mixture will slowly turn from sweet to sour. Once it reaches your desired level of tartness, you will bottle the liquid in a food-grade sealed bottle to let the natural carbonation build up during the second fermentation. Because this is home fermentation, you’ll want to take extra care to ensure all of your containers and tools are sterilized. I recommend immersing your jars and bottles in boiling water for a few minutes to eliminate undesirable pathogens from sneaking their way into your brew. Wash your hands well and keep your jar in a place where it won’t be disturbed, far away from activity and potentially germy situations.
Pay close attention to how your SCOBY looks—but only after the first week. It will look quite funky in the beginning with patchy white snowflake shapes, so avoid spending time in the first few days agonizing over whether you’re breeding a SCOBY or mold. But if you begin to see green, black, fuzzy and dry spots, it’s most definitely mold. When that happens, always veer on the safe side: toss the entire batch and start anew. A growing SCOBY will start off looking very stringy—that’s due to the yeast clusters. Over time, it should become a floating layer of milky, semi-opaque jelly that covers the surface of your tea mixture and conforms to the shape of your container. Use organic tea and sugar whenever possible.