My Favorite Kombucha Recipes — And How to Make Kombucha

Thanks for including my recipe in your favorite kombucha recipes post!!

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Don’t pay crazy prices for a kombucha mother (SCOBY) online! Come to the Culture Sharing group on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/181445115312844/), there are many people (including me) giving away SCOBYs for the cost of shipping ($3-6) or locally for free.

Rebecca, everyone is different in how they respond to kombucha, and two people with the same conditions can have totally opposite responses. If you drink it (start out with just a little per day, like 1/4C diluted with 3/4C water for a week or two, and slowly increase the amount, maybe a couple Tbsp at a time) and it makes you feel like crap and you don’t feel like crap if you don’t drink it, don’t drink kombucha. There is a lot of misinformation out there about kombucha and it’s very hard to sift the sanity from the silliness.

Sally Inman, I honestly don’t think homebrewed booch would be suitable for a diabetic. I know the “kombucha mythology” is that the culture eats up the sugar, but one of the other members of the aforementioned Facebook group has been tracking the sugar content of her kombucha with a gadget called a refractometer, used by winemakers and homebrewers to check the sugar content of wines and beers and judge fermentation progress, and she has found that not much of the sugar actually disappears. Sugar content is measured in units called “degrees brix”. One degree brix equals 1g sugar per 100ml liquid. I can’t find the post but the beginning brew started with a brix reading of around 13 (13g per 100ml), and when she stopped the kombucha was so sour as to be undrinkable but was still over 10 degrees brix. A brix of 10 is about 23g sugar per cup, 1C being roughly 230ml. The reason kombucha gets sour is the increase in acids created by the Acetobacter bacteria, not because the sugar is being used up. Acid can be very overpowering – think of how much sugar you need to sweeten lemon juice into lemonade! I have been experimenting with how little sugar I can get away with using and still get a decent brew and strong new SCOBYs, I’m down to 2/3C sugar per gallon of tea and many people (including the person doing the refractometer experiments) are using 1/3C sugar per QUART – remember 4 quarts to the gallon – so it’s half as much (although I started at 1C per gallon, 25% less), and I’ve got plenty of backup SCOBYs so I’m going to keep reducing until the SCOBY goes on strike or the brew tastes terrible. There are some commercial kombuchas that have as little as 5g sugar per cup; I know they are brewing under much more controlled conditions than can be possible in a home setting but I’d like to try to get it as low as I can. I’m not diabetic but I don’t need the sugar! Water kefir might be a better probiotic beverage for you – I can’t remember the exact numbers because I don’t like water kefir, but that experimenter’s water kefir had a much lower sugar content after fermentation.

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Thanks!

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