My very first kombucha brew started on September 6, 2017 and I bottled it exactly 2-weeks later on September 20, 2017. I have been tasting the brew for several days now. I finally decided when it had the tang of kombucha and a slight sweet undertone it was time to try the second fermentation. See... I don't know what the second fermentation will exactly do to the flavor, so hence I am jumping in with a scientific mindset, documenting my journey, here in this blog, along the way.
The first kombucha brew was a 50/50 blend of black and green tea. I purchased my SCOBY (Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yest) from Amazon. I used organic tea and organic cane sugar. One of these days I will describe how I start the kombucha brew.
I kept the brew in a dark-ish corner of my home and let it do its thing. It was fun seeing the SCOBY give "birth" to a new SCOBY which quickly grew to the dimensions of my glass jar. I started tasting it when I noticed bubbles forming around the new SCOBY. At first it was sweet and mildly tangy, until today when there was definite "kombucha zest" with a diminished sweetness riding in its wake.
I wasn't 100% prepared to bottle it, but I had purchased spirulina and chlorella in preparation to brew my own "Multi-Green" that GT's sell. (You must try this out next time you are at the grocery store!! Look for it in the produce section by the Odwalla juice.) I also happened to have one, lonely peach. So I bottled 3 containers with 1/4 teaspoon each of spirulina and chlorella, bottled 2 containers with a 1/4 of chopped-up peach, and bottled 1 container with a mix of spirulina/chlorella and peach. The last combination is another experiment to see if the kombucha needs the second sugar source (the peach) to produce the carbonation as I suspect spirulina and chlorella don't have much to offer in that department.
More is coming up! I'll discuss my other brews, how I started my kombucha brews, how this second fermentation comes out and more information on kombucha as I learn it!
