Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

• What is kombucha anyway?.
• Mention SCOBY and pellicle.
• Takes tea, all kinds (except oily ones) and sugar.
• Carbon from sugar, nitrogen and minerals from tea.
• Different ratios of green tea, black tea and sugar can encourage different sorts of fermentation. High sugar leads yeast-heavy, longer too, high tea content leads to bacteria-forward, both have their strengths and weaknesses, must decide what to go with.
• Master recipe is where you start.
• Boil tea (black, green, or mixture) add sugar while still warm, let cool, add the existing live kombucha culture,
• wait for couple of weeks with the container mouth covered but not airtight to let air in.
• Can be done in a week in hot climates, can take a month in colder temperatures, depends how you define ‘done’ for it to be ready.
• very sour kombucha, fermenting for months and years can be used as tea vinegar. I have 4-yearold tea vinegar in active use!
• Can be carbonated or not. TO carbonate, do secondary fermentation, add more sugar after first round is complete (priming sugar) and put it in an airtight bottle for a few days.
• Make space on the top of the bottle or it might explode.
• Flavors and infusions can also be added during this step.
• Or step 1.5 can be done, after tea fermentation is done, steep in fruit juices for a couple of days to let flavors in, and then do secondary fermentation to carbonate.
• 2ndary fermentation is not necessary.
• Can be drunk as a replacement for soda/water, cold tea.
• Isn’t sweet at all despite all the added sugar, the sugar was for bacteria and yeast.
• Can also be used for cooking. The pellicle has several new uses in materials science.
• Very hardy creature, can go for years without being fed, and come back alive in a matter of weeks to months.
• Need to get the balance of sugar + teas correct.
• Can get too boozy, booze happens when too much sugar is added in 2ndary fermentation (with juices which might have the right minerals). Can make folks drunk too! Accidental ones. Bad experience here!
• Never had a living kombucha culture that didn’t eventually work out fine.
• No need to maintain lab-level cleanliness, it’s fine, just treat like cooking, say to avoid steel materials, but it’s no big deal.
• Use glass containers, but plastic is fine too.
• Use good judgment, see if it smells the ‘right’ kind of funky or wrong. Hard to mess up. I have spoiled one batch among maybe 60 total, and that was because I stopped paying attention for better part of a year!