DIY Kombucha Homebrew | Preparing Black Tea 🍵

These beauties were from my last batch of Kombucha which I completed back in May, it's been too long!

For my last brew I had gone with a raspberry and peach flavour and was really happy with the result.

All together I think I used nearly a pound of handmade fruit puree for about 3.5 Litres of brew, probably overkill but it was bursting with flavours. The photo above is from the Raspberry Peach batch, the colour was fantastic too.

It All Start With the Tea

We'll technically it all starts with the last batch, because I saved some SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) from that brew that I will use in todays brew. One of the really cool aspects of fermentation brewing is managing live cultures.

If you're a Kombucha brewer then you've likely got what's referred to as a scoby hotel. This is where you house your scoby's for future use. This symbiotic culture is very much alive,... and waiting to feed again on sugar!

So I'll grab one of these scoby's out of their hotel and add it to about 3.5 Litres of brewed black tea.

The black tea has has a cup and half of sugar dissolved in it and has cooled down for at least an hour. Hot liquid could hurt or kill the scoby.

Today I am using Organic Black Tea from Four O'Clock. I've used green tea in the past with success as well.

My Recipe

Recipe + Ratio
16 Cups Purified Water
12 Tea Bags
1 SCOBY or.. 1 Bottle of store bought Regular non-flavoured organic raw kombucha [Going with SCOBY]
1.5 Cups Organic White Sugar
8 Oz. Fruit Puree as desired [16 Oz was truly overkill last time]

I'll go ahead and boil the water now and get the black tea steeping. We'll be back with the next steps shortly, so until then..

@cybershade

ADDITIONAL CONTENT