Another Booch Bombing

We've been making kombucha fairly successfully for many months now, experimenting with various types of tea for the base and with many different flavorings.

Yesterday I was preparing the tea for my next batch, waiting for Cindy to bring hers in so I could re-use the SCOBY*, when I heard, "Help, help, HELP" coming from her office.  The plastic spigot on the gallon jar she was using had failed spectacularly, shooting the spigot outward and spewing kombucha all over the floor of her office and the hallway.  Worse yet, she had tried to stem the flow with her hand and the jagged glass around the spigot opening had sliced four out of five of her fingers, so the blood was flowing as freely as the kombucha.

Don't Get A Jar With A Cheap Plastic Spigot For Your Booch

We got the mess on the floors cleaned up and Cindy patched up, but she was really bummed at losing that batch, because she had planned to flavor it with herbs and grapefruit juice.

So I had her drink the grapefruit juice instead to help her body recover from the shock, and we'll get a new jar (maybe with a spigot intended for brewing) and make a new batch.




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* SCOBY is an acronym for Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast.  The bacteria and yeast consume the tea and the sugar to produce the beneficial probiotics in the finished product.  Provided you actually get to the finished stage, of course.

For more information on brewing kombucha, check out the information at Kombucha Kamp.

"Clean Up On Aisle Three..."

We started our kombucha brewing a couple of weeks ago and put the jars of kombucha in the closet under the stairs to ferment.  Then we decanted it into quart bottles after ten days to develop the effervescence.

We checked it after a couple of days and everything seemed all right.  The kombucha I made with the white coconut tea and added lime and coconut juice had some lime pulp visible around the top, but everything seem fine, so we left it there to continue the fermentation process for a couple more days.

After a few more days we went back to check it and discovered that one of the bottles had exploded.  Fortunately, we had had the foresight to put a tray under the bottles, but even so much of the kombucha had dripped over the edge of the small tray and onto the bins of Christmas decorations, but it was easy enough to clean off the tray.  And the bins.  And the floor.

So I started a new batch on Sunday and checked it yesterday.  Didn't look right.  Cindy confirmed today that it probably shouldn't have green fuzzy stuff growing on top of it.

The joys of fermentation.

Sigh.  

Booch Madness

Cindy's guild in the San Diego County Garden Guild this year is the Food Preservation Guild.  She's always done some form or other of food preservation, but recently she's been interested in experimenting with fermentation.

During her chemo last Spring she couldn't drink wine, so we started drinking kombucha instead.  Kombucha is a fermented tea drink made by combining tea, sugar, water and yeast with a SCOBY (Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast) and allowing it to ferment.  

I had never heard of it before, but once we had, we started seeing it in all the grocery stores and even on some restaurant menus.  We tried a number of different flavors and liked most of them.  We even found a place not far from where we live that brews the stuff.  

It seemed like a natural step to try brewing our own, so Cindy took a short class a couple of weekends ago at the Living Tea Brewing Company, then we started our culture.  It's been fermenting away in the closet under the stairs for about ten days, so this morning we took the jars out, removed the SCOBYs, added some flavoring to each one and decanted the liquid into bottles.

Cindy's Sour Cherry Kombucha

Cindy used a green tea base to brew her version; she loves sour cherry juice, so that's what she added to flavor hers.

My Coconut Lime Kombucha

My favorite flavor of the commercial varieties we've tried is a coconut lime version, so that's what I added to mine.  I started with a coconut flavored white tea, and thought the stuff tasted pretty good without any additional flavoring, but I had already started juicing the limes, so I added about half a cup of lime juice and half a cup of coconut juice to it.  

Then we bottled both versions and put them back under the stairs to continue fermenting.

Still Fermenting

We'll let them develop some effervescence for a few days, and then see what we've got.