Kombuchamazing!!!

I made kombucha! Since starting Bastyr in the fall of 2008, I saw emails everywhere about "kombucha babies" and had no idea wtf these were. I had started drinking bottled kombucha while living in Santa Barbara, and found I could only tolerate the mango-flavored one because it was sweetest, the other ones were so bubbly it hurt my throat and tasted a bit on the, uh, NOT appetizing side. Then, a few weeks ago, my friend showed me his kombucha operation, had me try some, and I had a revelation: if this guy can do it, I could totally do it...better. So, when his kombucha "mother" had a "baby" I went and adopted it.

My little kombucha baby was pretty much the opposite of any other kind of baby, as far as the whole cute thing goes. This looked like a gigantic slime mold pancake swimming around in a concoction of some kind of nastiness. And it smelled like weird vinegar. As soon as I figure out how to get the photos off my camera and onto my computer, I'll post some pics of the lil guy. Anyway, I followed my buddy's instructions for constructing a suitable home for my new baby. If you would like to do this yourself, here are the ingredients:

1 gallon-sized glass--it MUST be glass--jar

an old t-shirt or some cheesecloth

a rubberband

enough brewed green or black tea to fill the jar

a bunch of sugar

and the instructions:

Brew up a gallon of caffeinated tea, this will use about 6-8 regular sized tea bags. I used loose leaf jasmine green tea, the kind where the tea is in little balls that pop open into flowery-like things when added to water, I used about 3-4 tablespoons of this tea.

Once tea is brewed, strain it and add 2 cups of sugar (I only had powdered sugar. It worked, but I also noticed that it contains cornstarch, but it was all I had at the time, and my first batch turned out just peachy. Next time, I'm goin for the organic evaporated cane juice...). Stir until sugar is dissolved and then let the tea cool to room temperature. This will take a long long time. I saw a youtube video where the woman just used a quart of water to make her tea and then added water to fill the gallon jar. Do whichever method you like, I've only done it the first way I've described.

Then, once the sugary tea is cooled to room temperature and in the gallon glass jar, plop in your kombucha baby. Oh yeah, you have to have a baby for this method. HOWEVER, I found yet another youtube video where these two guys describe how to make a kombucha culture from scratch. Basically, instead of adding the baby, just pour in a bottle of unpasteurized kombucha, I'd suggest GT's Kombucha since you can find it pretty much anywhere nowadays.

When the baby/bottled kombucha has been added, place the old t-shirt or cheesecloth over the mouth of the jar and rubberband it to keep it in place. Next, put your jar someplace dark and warm. I stuck mine in a cupboard above the stove at my house. And then you wait...

My kombucha fermented for 12 days (I've heard you can let it go for 2-3 weeks, but I got impatient). It wasn't too sweet but also had not begun to turn vinegary yet, and was slightly effervescent.

To bottle my kombucha, I simply removed the culture and it's subsequent babies (mine had triplets, yay!) and placed them in a glass dish with a extra "juice" from the big jar so they could float around and play. Then I simply poured the kombucha into GLASS bottles (old Pellegrino ones work well, so do those glass Knudsen juice bottles, or old wine bottles with a screwtop) with tight-fitting lids and place these in a dark, room-temperature place if you'd like them to ferment a little more and thus get more bubbly. When you want fermentation to stop, put 'em in the fridge. So far, I've only just bottled today so we'll have to wait a few more days to see what happens. This is basically just a test and retest approach here, I've got no strict "recipe", no formal instructions, which really wouldn't work anyway since climates are so different around the state/country/world. But what you have here is an excellent framework from which to grow your own kombucha in the comfort of your own kitchen. Since those bottles of GT's Kombucha run about $4 each (they're 16oz), homemade kombucha is definitely preferable if you're on the conservationist side of things. Plus, mine turned out absolutely delicious and I'm even going to bring some to school with me so that Rebecca can try it (she hates all things kombucha...maybe we'll convert her!)

I found that by referring to these nasty SCOBY's (symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast) as babies, I've grown quite fond of them, and don't want to throw them away, so if anyone reading this lives close by, feel free to let me know if you'd like to adopt one!