Kombucha is a fermented tea that has been around for a darn long time. We’re talking BC time, peoples. It’s a for REAL old school brew.
Way back before you’d head to your local supermarket for your weekly stock up, people all over the world would brew their own kombucha. It’s a craft that has been around for centuries.
Since we’ve been honing this craft over our humble 12+ years in the booch brewing world, we thought we’d give you a run down on how to make kombucha and how you can brew your own at home.
How to make kombucha
We brew our kombucha the old school way, in small batches for 30 days. This is the way we’ve always made our kombucha, so it’s the way we’re gonna explain to you right here right now.
Step 1: Brewing the tea
The first step is to brew a big ol’ pot of tea. We use certified organic green and black tea to kickstart this process before we add organic sugar. You might be surprised to learn we start our brew with sugar, given every single drink we make is 100% sugar-free. You can’t ferment tea without sugar, but we’ll touch on what happens to this sugar a little later.
Step 2: Adding the wild kombucha culture/SCOBY
We then add our mother culture, AKA SCOBY, AKA fermentation starter, to the tea. The SCOBY is another key part of any kombucha brew. You can’t make kombucha without your own mother culture.
Step 3: Fermentation process
Then it’s time to set the clock and let the brew ferment for 30 days. We pop our huggable-sized pots in a temperature-controlled (warm… very warm) room, but this isn’t an absolute must. The environment definitely matters when you’re fermenting your own tea, but you don’t need all the fuss for your DIY brew. More on this later.
But to return to our last “more on this later” point, how does a tea full of sugar turn into a sugar free kombucha?
The easy answer is fermentation science! Without getting into the nitty-gritty of it all, the live culture consumes all the sugar. But it doesn’t just disappear. It gets converted into healthy organic acids (AKA short-chain fatty acids), the very same kind produced by our own gut bacteria to aid important body processes.
Step 4: Flavors
When the fermenting is all said and done, we scoop the thick layer of SCOBY off the top and add natural flavors to our brews. Kombucha, without the added flavor, can taste quite tart and sour. We still dig an original brew, but we find most booch drinkers dig a bit of fun, fruity flave these days.
So, we use 100% natural flavors to give our bevvies a fruity profile. From a classic orange flave in our Orange Splash brew to a truly berry-licious flave in Mixed Berry, we craft our flaves to your tastebuds and get ‘em out in the world!
That’s the general process of brewing kombucha, with a bit of added Liquid Remedy spice! But how would you go about brewing your own kombucha at home? We’ve got a bit of experience in that arena, too, given it's how Liquid Remedy started.
Let’s walk you through it.
How to brew your own kombucha
INGREDIENTS
3.5 liters of filtered water
1 cup organic raw sugar
12g organic black tea (6 teabags)
12g organic green tea (6 teabags)
660ml Liquid Remedy Kombucha
METHOD
Step 1: Brewing the tea
Bring 3.5 liters filtered water to the boil. Add black tea and steep for 3 minutes. Add green tea and steep for a further 3 minutes. Strain tea into a 4-liter wide open mouthed jar and add sugar. Stir to dissolve. Cool to at least 86 degrees Fahrenheit.
“Black tea has a beautiful, rich profile but green tea is full of polyphenols,” says Liquid Remedy Founder, Emmet Condon.
Step 2: Adding SCOBY
If you have a mother culture (AKA SCOBY) and feeder*: Add kombucha feeder and place SCOBY on top of the liquid.
If starting from scratch: Add 660ml of Liquid Remedy Kombucha to the tea brew. Cover with muslin cloth and secure with an elastic band. Leave in a warm room away from food contaminants and direct sunlight for 7-10 days.
Step 3: Fermentation process
Depending on the temperature of where you live, your kombucha will be ready in about 7-10 days.
If you used an existing mother culture, your brew will have formed a "baby" mother culture.
If you used two bottles of Liquid Remedy to make the kombucha from scratch, your own mother culture will have grown along the surface of the jar.
Taste to decide if it's ready. The kombucha should taste slightly sour, with no tea flavor remaining. If you prefer a more sour taste, leave it to ferment for a few more days.
Step 4: Get it ready to drink
Remove mother culture (this can be used to make your next brew).
Transfer your finished kombucha into sealed bottles to keep in the fridge. Enjoy!
How To Flavor Kombucha
We use only the best, 100% natural ingredients in our drinks. This also, of course, extends to our flavors. Every flavor we use – be it to add a hit of raspberry or pack a punch in the mango flavour department – is natural.
And our ginger? A whole other world of cool. We use fresh Aussie ginger in our Liquid Remedy Kombucha Ginger Lemon, which has sometimes only been out of the ground for three days before its in one of our fiery brews. How cool is that?
Fruit Extracts vs Fruit Juices for Sugar Free Kombucha
We're all about carefully sourcing high-quality, all natural ingredients to ensure no sugar is added to our kombucha.
That's why we don't use juices for flavoring. Fruit juices usually have quite a high sugar content, so while they can be a pretty easy way to sweeten a drink and amp up those fruity flaves, they come with the side effect of adding sugar to the bevvie.
And that's not our jam.*
Instead, we use fruit extracts in our drinks. These are the flavor components of the fruit without any of the sugar that comes in the juices. They are high in flavor with no sugar, just the way we like it!
*We do use ginger juice and lemon juice in a few of our bevvies, only because they have very low fermentable sugars. This means we can still get the flavor of these juices without the sugar, keeping Liquid Remedy bevvies 100% sugar free.