Homemade Kombucha Tea Tutorial Better than Store Bought!

hi guys it's Katie today I'm going to show you how to make kombucha kombucha is fermented tea so it's just a batch of sweet tea that has been cultured with beneficial bacteria and yeast and those are the same beneficial microorganisms that are probiotics really great dairy-free probiotic source and it's a whole food so I'm going to show you how to make it it's very simple if you can make a batch of sweet tea and if you can get your hands on the culture then it's incredibly easy to make kombucha so I bet you know how to make a batch of sweet tea I'll show you how I do it in just a second but I want to talk about the culture and the culture is two parts in kombucha and you need at least one preferably both you need a Scobie I have a whole jar of extra scobie's this is called a Scooby Hotel where I just store extra scobie's you get a new Scooby or a thicker Scooby every time you brew so after a while you separate them or if a new one forms on the surface then you can just remove it and either give it to a friend or you can compost them there's all sorts of things that people do people feed them to their chickens people dehydrate them and turn them into like jerky almost but if you don't have a Scooby the best way to find a Scooby is to make a friend of somebody who already makes kombucha so if you don't have any friends who make kombucha make a friend who makes kombucha locally and you can find all sorts of groups online and meetups and like Weston a price foundation Zoar just natural living or if you go into a health food store they might be able to hook you up so with somebody who can give you a Scobie and if you don't have anyone local to give you a Scooby you can get them online again online groups about fermentation or natural living or traditional eating probably will have a bunch of people who would be willing to send you one for the cost of shipping and if you don't feel comfortable going that route you can buy them on Amazon on eBay on Etsy on you know personal blogs and things like that all sorts of people are selling scobie's and when you get a Scobie it usually comes with some liquids you can see in my jar I should probably top it off with a little more but there's some liquid in here and all that liquid is is finished kombucha so when you get your Scobie it will come in some liquid and that's just finished kombucha so that's the two parts that you need you need the scoby which is just this actual solid mass it's a cellulose mat that the bacteria makes there's also some dark spots on here that's ye strands that the yeast makes so this is not actually the bacteria and the yeast this is just something that the bacteria and yeast make to help them thrive the liquid that comes with your Scobie or that you've saved back from a previous batch that's what is actually inoculating your batch so if you can't get your hands on a Scooby but you can get your hands on a bottle of commercially made unpasteurized unflavored kombucha you can let that sit out add some sweet tea to it and you probably will grow a Scooby just from the liquid so the liquid plus the scoby is what you preferably would have if you have to pick one or the other pick the liquid over the scoby so I have like I said a whole bunch and all you need to do once you get your culture is make a batch of sweet tea and you can make your sweet tea however you like if your Scobie came with a ratio or a recipe for the amount of tea and the amount of sugar I would recommend using that for at least the first couple of tries and then after you get more comfortable with it you can experiment cut back sugar add more sugar try different teas so this is how I make my so I use these half-gallon mason jars and I just use hot hot water out of my tap some people boil it I just find that the water out of the tap is hot enough so I'm doing two batches here I'm going to do a batch of green tea and a batch of black tea and it's exactly the same you're just using black tea bags or green tea bags there's all sorts of kinds of tea that you can use I would recommend sticking with white tea black tea green tea things that are actually tea you don't want anything that's a mix or things that are flavored or things that are not actually teas like herbal teas at least to begin with I know a lot of people experiment once they get comfortable making kombucha feel free to experiment in all of these steps but I would say when you're first starting out I would stick to the recipe that came with your Scobie or one that you find online or follow my directions here now once you make a few batches of kombucha and you get a couple extra scobie's like this spare scooby's then feel free to experiment to your heart's content because if something goes wrong if your Scobie starts getting weak and it takes a long time for your tea to ferment or if it molds or if something terrible happens then you have a backup Scobie so I have my half-gallon mason jars and I just fold them half full because the sugar the starter liquid and the scoby are all going to displace some liquid so you don't want to make it too much so we're basically making a concentrated sweet tea and then we'll add those extra things and then top off with water so what you can put the tea bags in and sweeten it or sweeten it then put the tea bags and it doesn't really matter my ratio is a half gallon batch I use 2/3 cup of sugar and you can use regular white granulated sugar that's what a lot of people have really good luck with you can use organic evaporated cane juice if that's what you want to use using something like honey or agave nectar or some sort of alternative sweetener generally doesn't give you as good as a result but like I said if you want to experiment with that once you get a few batches under your belt feels so I'm just using regular white granulated sugar and I'll just stir that to dissolve the sugar once the sugars dissolved that I'm just going to add my tea bag so for my half gallon batches I use four tea bags and I use this brand for black tea I got this really good price on Amazon four of those and for the green tea I use this brand also very inexpensive high quality I like it a lot you'll get four of those out and I'm just going to chunk them down into the hot water okay and I'm going to let these steep for several minutes it's pretty warm to the touch and you want to make sure your tea is perfectly cooled down to room temperature because just like baking bread with yeast and making yogurt with yogurt cultures you're going to kill your culture your bacteria and your yeast are going to die if you put them in too hot of an environment so I'm going to let these steep until they come to room temperature and that's going to make quite strong brew the green tea sometimes I will pull out a little bit sooner just because it's more likely to go bitter when it's strong but for the black tea I usually let it cool all the way down to room temperature and it will make quite a strong brew but again we're going to top this off so it will dilute it a little bit and also you need a strong brew because there's things in the tea that help the scoby thrive things like the caffeine and the tannins really help this Gobi thrive so they actually consume quite a bit of the tannins and that's what gives tea its bitterness so don't don't be afraid to make your brew nice and dark you'll see the finished kombucha will be quite a bit lighter than the tea that I brew so I'll just let these sit here for 20 minutes or however long it takes to cool off if you boil your water ahead of time you know feel free to put it in the refrigerator or just leave it overnight but you want to make sure that your tea is cooled down to at least room temperature before you your culture so I'm going to set these aside while they finish cooling and I'll pull out my last week's batch so these are my finished kombucha and like I said you can see how much lighter it becomes so like I said don't be afraid to throw that nice and strong and then here on the top you can see my Scooby and I want to pull this one out because I want to show you scobie's can look all sorts of ways and this one actually has looks like it has an air bubble trapped in it which I think I just deflated there's an air bubble there this is actually two scobie's that have kind of fused together and this one also you can see there has quite a bit of yeasty strands so Scooby's end up looking very different depending on the type of tea you can see how this one's very dark because it's been soaking in black tea this one's kind of bumpy and lumpy because it had that air bubble sometimes they're perfectly smooth and white and sometimes they have more or less of this sort of jellyfish tendrils hanging off of them but as long as there's not mold and you're talking about the same kind of mold that you would see on bread like fuzzy mounds of white or blueish colored mold as long as you're not seeing mold then your Scoobies probably okay so right here I have a batch of finished kombucha I'm actually going to point you a little bit to the light because I want to show you how I know when my kombucha is ready to go into the second ferment so let's see if you can see if you look closely you might be able to see bubbles rising from the bottom so when there's bubbles rising from the bottom that's how I know that it's ready for me there's other ways that you can tell if it's ready mostly by tasting it and smelling it when you're doing your first couple of batches you're want to look at it smell it and taste it every day to see how it's changing and it can be fermented a few days and have a very strong tea flavor and a very sweet flavor and you can drink it then if you want or you can let it go more days and catch it kind of in that sweet and sour phase or you can let it ferment even longer and it will at some point become as strong and sour as vinegar most people don't let it go that long at least not on purpose but anywhere in that range you can stop it and you can flavor it or you can drink it unflavored you can bottle it up to make it fizzy and effervescent I'm usually I'm usually on the farther end the more sour end when I first started I was on the sweeter end so as you can't become accustomed to it your taste may change depending on the kind of tea it may change and depending on what you're going to flavor it with it might change so the first thing I need to do is I need to reserve some of this liquid before I flavor it before I you know allot it to being drinking kombucha I need to save some liquid back so that I can inoculate my next batch so you do that first so you don't forget and what I'm going to do actually is I'll go ahead and stir this because down here on the bottom you'll see sort of a sediment that's usually yeast that settled down there and you just want to stir it up to make everything homogenous that's the stirring it up makes it fizz just like soda pop I'll let that settle down a little bit another reason I like to stir it is because I do like to not come in that dissolved carbonation out because when I go to sweetness and add sugar for my second permit if I don't then it can fizz up and over stir that up to make it modernist and then I'm going to save back a cup if you're brewing your kombucha and you're drinking it when it's more sweet you might want to save back more because the stronger the more sour it is that means there's more bacteria and yeast in the brew so if you're catching it before it actually ferments very long you'll need more of it to get the amount of inoculation that you'll need so that's a cup of that black tea kombucha saved back for that batch and now there's a couple things you can do you can just drink this as it is you can bottle it up and make it fizzy and you can also flavor it so I usually flavor it and bottle it up so these are the bottles that I use they're called string top or bail top bottles these are old Grolsch beer bottles so you can just buy Grolsch beer and either drink the beer give it to somebody and drink it and save the bottle so you can also just buy these swing top bottles or there's certain times at Aldi they'll have certain soda pops that come in bottles like that so just keep your eye out for this kind of bottle you can also use other kinds of bottles glass bottles that you may have bought commercial kombucha in but find these are a little bit easier to work with so for a half gallon batch once you've removed a cup it usually works out to be exactly three of these girls bottles so that's convenient so a lot of the sugar that I put into this when I brewed this tea has been consumed by the bacteria and caused the kombucha to turn from T to kombucha so what I'm going to do is I'm going to add some more sugar so there's some more sugar for it to eat when it's in the bottle so that it can make more carbonation and become fizzy like soda pop so if you've ever bottled beer or you know home brewed beer this is the same thing as adding a priming sugar to your bottles I add a measured amount of sugar to pretty much all of my batches of kombucha so I have it on the scale here and you can experiment with this but 20 grams is when I put in a half gallon batch after I remove my one cup of starter liquid just go ahead and add 20 grams of more of that granulated sugar and you can see how it's fizzing up just from the sugar going in so storing it down this is a good idea okay so that's 20 grams and just stir that to dissolve that in and then from here you can add your flavorings you can add fruit fruit juice you can add things like mint ginger cinnamon there's all sorts of things that you can add to it if you're going to use fruit juice or dried fruits it would be better if it's something that you made yourself so you made the juice to buy either pureeing fruit and straining it or if you have a juicer i wouldn't use any commercially available juices that are pasteurized or that have any preservatives in them same thing with dried fruit unless you find something that's just fruit that's been dehydrated anything that has any preservatives or color retention enhancers or anything like that I wouldn't add so just something that's just fruit would be what I would suggest but frozen fruit a lot of times is just fruit so that's what I use a lot of times so you can add your flavorings to the whole batch and then decant into your bottles or you can add flavors to individual bottles and decant your unflavored kombucha into your bottles so if I'm using a fruit juice or a few fruit puree I'll usually add it to the whole thing and then put it into the bottles but more often than that I'm using whole fruit so I have some frozen blueberries generally I'll put about a half a cup of fruit juice if I'm doing a whole batch or if I'm doing individually into the bottles I usually do about 20 30 or 40 grams of fruit depending on how strong I want to make it so I'm just going to put some little blueberries in here and these are still frozen you can thaw them out you can use fresh these little wild blueberries are nice and small so they're easy to get in and out of the bottle all right so now I have my blueberries in the bottles so I'm just going to use a funnel give my finished kombucha monster and pour it in so I fill mine well up into the neck I have my three bottles of blueberry black tea kombucha and I just need to wash down the lids and leave this on the counter to ferment now like I said we added more sugar and the sugar from the fruit so the bacteria that's in the finished kombucha will eat that sugar and produce carbon dioxide that carbon dioxide is being trapped by the lid and it's going to carbonate just like soda pop or beer so you want to leave it on the counter to give that bacteria a chance to do that and that could take three-four days depending on how warm it is in your house so what you want to do is after a day or two you want to burp it and burping it just means that you hold the lid down and you very carefully open it like that and see if you hear a hiss of some gas escaping and if you do and it's just a little bit then latch it back and leave it for another couple days you want to hear a nice strong hit the same is it when you're opening a bottle of soda pop that way you know that there's actual carbonation building up once you get a nice strong hiss then you want to put everything in that refrigerator and let it chill down before you drink it so these are going to go on the counter I leave them right with my other brew that's fermenting and I'll check on it in a few days show you what these look like right so for the green tape you're going to do the same thing so I will take out the scoby and see how this one's a lot whiter on the surface because it's a lighter tea take out the scoby give it a stir pour out about a cup to reserve for your next batch set that aside and add 20 grams of sugar slowly and then I'll show you a different way of flavour what I have here this is actually blueberries and raspberries that I pureed strained and froze into ice cubes and when I pour it into the ice cube mold I measured it and each one of these cubes is about 25 grams of pureed fruit so I'm going to put three or four of those in now we just need to let those melt but that will flavor the whole batch and then I can just decant it into my bottles instead of individually you know adding fruit to each bottle so the ice cubes have all melted so now I just need to fill in our bottles all right so now these are mostly cool I did pull the green tea tea bags out a black tea I pull out now so at this point this is just sweet tea so I'm going to go ahead and add my starter liquid and this goby and if this goby sinks it's fine if it floats it's fine if it hangs out in the middle that's fine too we'll do the same thing over here with the green tea goes in and from here we're just going to top them off with some cool water to make a full half gallon and these need to be covered with a breathable cover so I use cloth napkins or just a scrap of fabric some people use coffee filters I would not use a paper towel because some of the liquid might get on the paper towel and then once paper targets well it's not very strong and you need to have a nice secure but breathable cover as this ferments it will attract flies and fruit flies and things like that so even if you don't normally have flies in your kitchen it paid may seek out your kombucha so here's my Scoobies kind of floating halfway down that's fine and this one it's floating right there on the surface so I'll go ahead and leave these on my counter and we'll check on them in a couple days and I'll show you what they look like okay so it's been I spent almost three days not quite three full days but I'll give you a look at the kombucha it's been really warm in my kitchen even with my air conditioning running we're getting close 100 degree temperatures so there's it's a quite quick to permit when it's warm so this is already cloudy so if you're going to be able to see the bubbles but bubbles are rising and this one is pretty clear of floaters give you a look at the scoby just to show you that you know sometimes they look pretty gnarly but like I said as long as there's not very little mounds of white fuzzy mold then you should be good then I'll show you the green tea Scooby looks really nice and smooth and see an air air pockets being trapped there but again that's fine you might be able to see a little bit better on the lighter tee but there's little globs of these strands and all sorts of stuff floating that's perfectly normal sediment on the bottom see if you can catch any bubbles rising yeah I think I can see bubbles rising in the viewfinder and then those you can taste them or smell them smells a little bit like vinegar I'm not quite ready to bottle these so I'll let them go a little bit longer but like I said if it's your first couple of times and you might like it a little sweeter you want to taste it frequently so you can catch it at the point where you like it and then I'll show you burping these bottles where you can see if we can hear the hiss of the gas escaping so you want to always press down and you want to very open this in a very controlled manner because if there's a lot of pressure it will blow this off and shoot up so if that's going to happen you can usually tell so you hear that hiss but it's not coming up well it's going to start to come up slowly it's fizzing but it's not anything to bottle we'll try this one this is the one that had the whole fruit in it see if you can hear see that one that's nice and fizzy alright so this is ready to go in the fridge and once it chills down it shouldn't be that explosive it's just pretty warm in my house right now so we'll put that in the fridge let it cool down for at least 24 hours and then we can drink it this one that just fist a little bit will let go another day or two all right so this finished kombucha has been in the fridge for at least 24 hours and I'm going to open it I got this little strainer is a very convenient it not only catches the fruit but it also catches little these strands and sometimes little mini scobie's will form on the surface here and you know that's not going to hurt you to drink those things but if you want to strain them out this is a really convenient strainer so I guess I go put your hand down see if we can open this a little more controlled way than yesterday that's super fizzy carbonated blueberry kombucha and so from here all we have to do is wait for the brew that I made to finish fermenting and then we'll do the same thing flavor it bottle it make a new batch hope you found this video helpful if you have any questions you can leave them in the comments down below try to answer your questions thanks so much for watching bye

Channel: Katie Cooks and Crafts

Views: 85,793

Rating: 4.8693714 out of 5

Keywords: recipe, how to, diy, homemade, scratch, fermented, fermentation, kt, booch, boocha, traditional food, raw, vegan, probiotic, lacto fermentation, kamboocha, gt, making, green tea, black tea, organic, fizzy

Id: 05tsMLBdHiU

Length: 26min 17sec (1577 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 04 2016