I love kombucha! I love every bit of it, except when it goes bad of course. I love the way it tastes, how sometimes I can taste the alcohol more. How certain teas and brewing times get something completely different! I’ve found a favorite tea combination. Black tea and osmanthus flowers. There is a blend at our co-op I stumbled upon. I picked it because it looked pretty. Dark curled tea leaves with tiny rolled up flowery things. It looked like thick sand.
In the last couple of months of making kombucha I’ve discovered a few things.
- Black tea with osmathus flowers is my favorite tea base!
- Kombucha that has gone bad due to contamination or a general mistake tastes like rotting veggies, puke, and vinegar
- Green tea based kombucha fermented for a month is too strong for me, almost starts to taste like vinegar
- Green tea fermented for about two weeks tastes almost like slightly fermented white grape juice.
- Kombucha is a diuretic and I should drink more water to counteract it. Didn’t occur to me right away that kombucha is still a caffeinated tea and thus is a diuretic
- It’s a great thing to take to work and not have to worry about refrigerating it
- Lots of people have never heard or it or are very interested and didn’t know you could make it yourself!
At the moment I have three restarted, all with the black tea and osmanthus flower blend. Those batches harvested green tea that I let ferment too long. I’m not a huge fan of month long fermented green tea kombucha, now might be a good time to start making blends with fruits.
I used part of my fourth gallon to give someone a kombucha baby and starter. That was at the beginning of the week. I had forgotten about the remaining kombucha and the mother. Well, she’s busy growing another baby. I might leave them growing as an experiment to see if it can be grown again, without a new batch of tea and sugar.
On a final note, I saw the co-op has stopped carrying raw kombucha for an undetermined time. Something about a production problem. I hope that it doesn’t blow up in the companies face. It would be horrible if they were forced to pasteurize their kombucha. (Think Adwala juice just a few years ago.) I would like to say, about the kombucha left on the shelves that isn’t raw, it’s not the same thing. It’s not live. All that is good for you in kombucha is killed with higher heat applications/processes such as pasteurization. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that other non-raw stuff is just as beneficial. This whole thing makes me very glad that I make my own. I have control and no one can take it away from me just because a batch was contaminated. I love feeling independent!
The Modern Hippy
Green Tea Kombucha with Eucalyptus
