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Many people are interested in brewing kombucha, but have a hard time finding a source for a scoby (mother, mushroom...they are the same thing). Here's how to do it without spending a fortune!
Buy a 12 oz bottle of prepared Kombucha tea from a health food store.
Prepare the sweet black tea as follows: Boil just less than a gallon of water, pour into a gallon size jar, add 2 cups white sugar (do not use anything like honey, or succanat, etc), add four Lipton black tea bags.
Steep tea fifteen minutes. Remove tea bags and discard.
Let tea cool to room temperature.
Pour in the entire bottle of kombucha.
Cover with a clean, thin cloth and secure with a rubber band. Let culture undisturbed about 2 weeks. Then you should have a mother on top and the tea should be ready to strain and enjoy!
Keep back 2 cups of the tea to add to your next gallon of sweet tea, along with the mother, of course. The next brew only needs to be 7-10 days long.
You will grow a new mother with each batch.
These are directions for basic kombucha. Once you learn how to do the basic, you can get creative! Lots of folks use flavored tea to switch things up or add fruits to the finished product to flavor it.
*ETA: Most store-bought kombucha is now pasteurized. Pasteurized kombucha will NOT grow a culture, or give you the benefits of raw kombucha. It is inferior by far.
2 comments:
Thanks for the recipe! I'm a little confused though. for the second batch do you put the "mother" from the first batch in? or just the two cups from the first batch?
You add the 2 cups of kombucha from the first batch AND a mother/scoby. You get a new scoby with each batch, so I end up putting at least a couple of mothers in each gallon jar. Extras are given away, used as fertilizer or composted.
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