Christopher Weeks wrote:I've started kombucha three times. Each time I got a bottle of commercial, unflavored, live kombucha from the store, and just poured it into a vessel of sweetened, cooled, strong tea. After a couple of weeks there was a healthy SCOBY. It took almost no work on my part.
I have an easier method than that. You can simply open a bottle of kombucha and let it sit out at room temperature for a couple weeks and it will form a new scoby right inside the bottle, but then it is difficult to get out of the bottle because the mouth is so narrow. So, the next easiest way to do it is to pour the contents of a bottle of kombucha into a mason jar and cover it tightly with a coffee filter and let it sit out at room temperature for two weeks.
Kombucha overall is much easier than water kefir and if you go on vacation for a couple weeks, no big deal. The kombucha gets very acidic but it doesn't harm the scoby nor the culture at all.
One mistake I see people make a lot with kombucha is giving it too much sugar and too much tea. It makes the kombucha murky and eventually weakens the culture and the resulting new forming scoby. For a half gallon glass container, I only put in one heaping tablespoon of white sugar, and only two tea bags of black tea. I end up with clearish kombucha that looks exactly like the store bought kombucha. It looks like clear apple cider, not murky at all.
Posted: Tue Nov 08, 2016 7:33 pm