Saving a 3 month KOMBUCHA SCOBY!

hi everybody welcome to living traditions homestead my name is sarah and today i come to you with a confession i have been a terrible kombucha keeper and i've actually completely let this kombucha go to vinegar it's completely ruined as far as drinking it just as a nice kombucha drink goes but not all is lost this isn't a completely failed event and i want to talk with you today about uses of kombucha vinegar how i can salvage this really old Scobie and then make it into a fresh new batch so that in a couple of days we can have kombucha again so you know on our homestead we have been making kombucha and drinking it for probably a year now and I've never made a video about it and the reason is well we just don't drink it like a lot of people do when you're making kombucha most people will ferment it two times they'll ferment it the standard way and then they'll do a second ferment where they'll flavor it and make it super bubbly and a lot of times bottle it when you do a second ferment oftentimes you will either add juice as a source of sugar and flavor to reefer mint it or some kind of fruit and then they'll bottle it and when you open it it's fizzy like a soda and you can drink it that way on our homestead we actually only do a first ferment we prefer it that way and because of that I just haven't felt comfortable doing a video we not only like the taste of it just fine without it but I really don't like to buy juice at the grocery store I really just don't like buying much of anything at the grocery store so it's an added expense for me we don't have a lot of sources for homestead juice here yet maybe in the future and I just don't also want to afford the fruit that would be added to make a second ferment we just really like the taste of the first ferment so let's talk about this this kombucha vinegar did I mention that I think that I forgotten this for like three months two and a half months I think this was ready to drink in September and it is now the middle of December it's not a very good kombucha mom for sure but there are still things to do with this and I want to share with you three things that we use this for on the homestead but first let's take this out and see what it actually looks like let me bring you up close so you can see what this Scobie looks like by now so we can check it out to see if there is anything bad or rotten or you know moldy about this kombucha scoby and see if it's still good to go forward and just to see what three-month-old kombucha vinegar it looks like let's just take off this top this is just cotton fabric that I put on top of it now let's take a look at that Scobie so there is absolutely no evidence of anything yucky about it there is no mold no bugs have gotten inside of it and turned it yucky it's actually a beautiful whitish Scobie on top but with very clean hands I'm actually going to take this Scobie out so that we can look at it a little bit more closely and figure out what we can salvage and what needs to be tossed now scobie's don't need to be tossed in the trash they can actually go to your chickens or they can be put in your compost pile so let's just take that out that's upside down and we're going to take a look at this Scobie a little bit closer but this is the amount of kombucha vinegar we have left I'm going to transfer this into another container so I can use this again to make more kombucha and I'm going to put it in the refrigerator I'm gonna keep at least one cup of it in the bottom of here so that we can use it as starter liquid in our next batch now that we have the scoby out and on the plate I want to talk with you a little bit about what is going on here and what we're gonna save and what we're not gonna save so here is our giant thick Scobie here and this one down here is actually the original Scobie that went in and you can see that it's a pretty pretty much a darker color than the rest of the scoby and this is actually peeling off so when I put it into the kombucha originally it was like this and the original Scobie was down here and over time it has created more and more layers of Scobie on top of it and so this is all a living entity but the original Scobie is at the end of its life and that's why it's darker like this and so I'm just gonna take that off and that is going to go to the chickens or into the compost pile and what we're going to use is one of these layers to start our news our new kombucha for those of you who are not familiar with kombucha kombucha is a fermented tea it's like sweet tea but fermented you use black tea or green tea like you would to make a cold sweet tea but you add in a colony of bacteria and yeast call the scoby Scobie stands for symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast and when you put that Scobie in a solution of tea and sugar and leave it in a warm place for several days in my case is generally nine days the end result is a fermented tea that it's still kind of on the sweet side a little bit effervescent and it's very very tasty there are some health benefits to kombucha although there has been some argument in the science world about what the benefits are if there are any but I can tell you from experience that our family has benefited from it tremendously there are a lot of antioxidants in kombucha which is great for your immune system and there's a lot of great probiotics which are fantastic for gut health we and our family has noticed a tremendous difference in our health and well-being when we are actively drinking kombucha on a daily basis kombucha isn't very complicated to make I'm gonna make a batch today with leftover Scobie and some of the kombucha vinegar that is left over and I'm just gonna show you how easy it is the first thing that we need to do to make kombucha is to make tea actually a sweet tea and the instructions that I follow are from an information card that I got along the way from a company called Joshua Tree kombucha and I'm actually going to take a picture of this so you can actually have it have it as reference as well and I'm gonna post this on our Instagram account you can find us at living underscore traditions on Instagram so I'm actually going to be filling this entire thing up with tea but we need to brew some tea first I have this this water boiling on the stove I'm going to just fill this gallon jar up partially with the boiling water and we're going to add the tea bags so I put them out of two inches of boiling water at the bottom of my one gallon jar here and according to my instructions I'm going to use 8 tea bags I'm going to use six black tea bags and two green tea bags I'm just gonna put them down in there I'm going to mix them up a little bit and then I'm gonna let them brew in there for five to six minutes now that we have all of the tea bags out we're gonna add one cup of sugar okay so we're gonna mix that in until it is all dissolved so I'm going to fill the rest of this up with cold filtered water just gonna give that a stir I'm actually going to take a temperature reading kombucha scoby swill actually be killed by too hot of heat so we're looking for a temperature that's no warmer than 85 degrees and it is definitely underneath there it's actually 66 degrees the best temperature for kombucha to be sitting at is somewhere between 75 and 80 degrees 66 degrees is a little long the cool sign but where we keep this it'll be on the warmer side so it'll warm it up now it's time to add the starter liquid we need one cup of starter liquid and I'm actually gonna grab the little Scobie that I'm gonna put in there move it out for a minute use one cup of the starter liquid which is the previous batch of kombucha in this case it is the kombucha vinegar Oh like I could have been more perfect than that okay we're gonna add that in [Music] stir it up put the scope in there then I'm going to cover it back up with a piece of cotton cloth and a rubber band there that's all done so this is going to be put into a warm area in a special little place you have a little cubby for our kombucha to just sit and warm up and and ferment and ours will be done in about nine days you can start testing it to see if it's the right flavor or level of sweetness or level level of sourness for you after you know seven days or so but generally nine days is a perfect amount of time for us on our homestead now I promised you I was going to tell you what I'm going to use all of this kombucha vinegar for and the primary way that we are going to use this kombucha vinegar on the homestead is for a hair rinse on our homestead we don't use any hair conditioner in fact we don't use very many products that like cleaning products and and those kinds of things that are from the store we we really use mostly homemade there are a couple things that I haven't mastered yet one of them being shampoo the girls and I generally use an apple cider vinegar rinse instead of conditioner but when we have kombucha vinegar around we use kombucha vinegar hair rinse instead the formula for that is really easy it is one cup kombucha vinegar two three cups water we just used that and make that up in a mason jar and take that into the shower with us basically we dump it over our hair when we're done shampooing leave it in there for the rest of our hour and then rinse it out really well vinegar and kombucha vinegar is actually a really great conditioner for the hair the live probiotics and the live bacterias and things in the kombucha vinegar and an apple cider vinegar that is raw it's so good for your scalp is actually very good for your hair leaves it much more soft than you would ever imagine using a vinegar and it actually does act like a detangler you wouldn't think that a vinegar would be a detangler but mixed with water and used on your hair it's actually amazing try it I bet you'll like it with three girls in the house with long hair this amount of Kombucha vinegar is not going to last very long the other way that I use it on the homestead is in a vinaigrette if you're making homemade vinaigrette switch I highly recommend you can substitute the kombucha vinegar for any of the other vinegars that you would use however because kombucha vinegar is not as strong tasting it's not as acidic you'll want to double the amount of vinegar when you're using Kabuto kombucha vinegar the last way that we're going to use this on the homestead and it doesn't use very much of the kombucha vinegar I'm gonna turn this into a toner a facial toner for the girls I have one teenage girl and one pre teenage girl and they're starting to go through the time where they are washing their face a couple times a day to control any outbreaks of acne and kombucha toner is amazing you can actually use it just plain kombucha vinegar on your face with a cotton swab just put it on there and let it dry or you can mix it with aloe vera juice and the proportions would be 1/2 a cup of kombucha vinegar 2 a porter cup al vera juice that you would buy in the store or if you have aloe vera plants and want to actually harvest some aloe vera from inside of there you would use 2 tablespoons of the aloe vera gel from the plant now you'll want to keep that in the refrigerator if you're using the aloe vera especially right from the plant because it's not preserved in any way and you don't want any bacteria to be growing inside of there so I hope I've demystified kombucha for you a little bit showing you that even if you screw up and you forget about it for 3 months it can still be salvaged and everything's gonna be ok you can still make kombucha from that Scobie and you can still use that kombucha vinegar I also have a pipe that I made it seemed not so complicated when I first started I was kind of intimidated by first ferment and the second ferment and actually the first ferment tastes fantastic for us so we don't even have to mess that second part you guys I hope you try kombucha I hope if you screw up you don't just throw it away I hope you try some of the ideas that I've given you today if you enjoyed this video and you're not a subscriber yet right now is a perfect time to hit the subscribe button below don't forget to check us out on our social media including Instagram and until next time thanks so much for stopping by the homestead take care and God bless

Channel: Living Traditions Homestead

Views: 97,068

Rating: 4.9116778 out of 5

Keywords: Living Traditions Homestead, Missouri, Ozark's, homesteading, Ozarks, self-sufficient, homesteaders, unjobbing, kombucha vinegar, kombucha recipe, kombucha scoby, kombucha, kombucha vinegar hair rinse, kombucha vinegar hair conditioner, kombucha vinaigrette, kombucha vinegar skin toner, homestead couple, homesteading couple, kevin and sarah, missouri homesteaders

Id: 5iCSrVbG5Uw

Length: 15min 6sec (906 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 15 2018