How we make Kombucha

Ingredients: 1Liter 4Liter

Organic raw canesugar 100g. 400g

Organic black tea 6g 24g

Kombucha starterculture 1dl 4dl

Scoby 1st 1st

This recipe is easy to scale, we suggest you decide what size jar you’re going to use and adjust the recipe to that jar. Often you start with a smaller amount of starter culture, so you have to expand it by making a small batch first and put away as much starter culture you need for the jar you chose. This will make more sense as you read on.
Since Kombucha is a living culture, we urge you to not poison it, or yourself, by not using organic ingredients.

-Boil some of the water (a little less or about half of it..)

-Put the tealeafs and sugar in the boiled water and let it soak for 15 minutes, stir every now and then to make the sugar dissolve.

Strain and add the rest of the water cold so that the whole tea mixture is not so hot

-When the tea is kind of finger-warm (too hot kills the culture), add the scoby and the starter culture, use glass, ceramic or plastic bowl.

-Cover with a cloth and rubber band. The brew must have access to air. Set aside in a place with an even room temperature.

-Set a reminder to taste after 10 days. Has it become sour? Is it still too swet?

-Taste every other / every third day after that.

-When you think it is sweet enough, take out the scoby and as much clean /unflavoured finished kombucha as needed for the next batch (1 dl / liter,  if you mean to brew 8 liters, take out 8 dl), put the scoby together with the starter culture in a glass jar in the fridge until you are ready to make the next brew. It can be there for several weeks.

 -Put some flavorings in the rest of the batch, mashed berries, fruit, spices.Cover with cloth and let stand at room temperature for 2 days.

 -Strain the flavorings and put the strained, flavored kombucha into bottles with a properly sealed cork.

-Let the bottles stand at room temperature for 2 days for carbonation 

-Now the kombucha is ready, store the bottles in your fermentation stopping device, (cellar or fridge). If they’re in room temperature for longer, dangerous pressure can build up in them. I usually relive some pressure from every bottle once before I put them down in the cellar, if the first one I open seems very reactive. If not, I'll just put them directly in the cellar.

-Open the bottles carefully the first time regardless, be prepared to close quickly if it turns out that they are very carbonated, so that half the bottle does not spill out into the room.

-If you use glass bottles, you should use stronger ones made for carbonated drinks. It can be dangerous to store the kombucha in just any regular glass bottle. Plastic bottles works fine and won’t explode, but in our opinion it is not such a good idea since all plastic is more or less toxic.

-Here is a link on a Swedish site to the kind of bottle we use, it is made for beer and so it holds pressure very well and does not explode too easily. (Has been tested) My guess is that with a little searching you can find something similar to order closer to where you live.

https://vinshoppen.se/olflaska-1-lit-m-bygelkapsyl.html

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