I haven't brewed Kombucha in a while. I did a few batches of "elderberry fizz". I need to track down the recipe, but if memory serves it was

• 3 liters filtered water
• 3(?) cups sugar
• 8 elderberry flower heads
• 2 lemons
• 3tbs red wine vinegar

Find the flowers.

Dissolve the sugar in the water and let cool. Add lemons and vinegar and float the flowers on top. Cover with a cloth.

Stir 2x per day for 2-4 days. Bottle and let sit for a week. Refrigerate.

(I changed my numbering system to start at "#2" to match the github issue IDs. So now my first modern attempt is #2. This is the fourth batch, but it says #5.)

I got a box (16 bags) of Choice Organic Teas / Oothu Single Estate / Organic Orange Pekoe / Black Tea on sale. I figured I should use 8 bags so I can get 2 batches from the box. All 16 are 32g so I'm using a bit less by weight than #2 and a lot less than #3, #4.

4 cups sugar. Water from an electric kettle, 212º. Sat in an ice bath until cool to the touch, then into the jar. I'm not sure what to call the thing. 'Beverage dispenser' won't do it, but it's not a jar or a jug or a crock. TODO, find a name.

I bottled 8 x 16oz two nights ago. I did one test the night before with lemon juice and ginger, and it turned out pretty well. I gave some to Eric W to test and he said it was good. I drank the rest of the bottle.

That left the big jar about 1/3 full. The tea still tasted OK, but it was getting pretty sour.

I brewed the new tea twice as strong, using 2 x 23g tea satchets, and used 6 cups of sugar instead of 4.

I then mixed the hot sugary tea with enough cold filtered water in a big food safe plastic container to fill it up just right (lucky guess) and sat that in cold water in the sink until it was cool enough to dump in with the scoby. Pouring the fresh stuff in tumbled the SCOBY all around, but it floated pretty quickly back to the surface of the jar.

I'm going to keep this batch covered with an old pullover so it shouldn't see too much daylight. I guiltily turned the heat in my room up a few degrees to see how that affects the process, we'll see how long I can stand pushing 70ºF when I'm biking to work in -20º.

Same as last time. I picked off the top layer of scoby to pass on. I tried to get some of the little yeast bugs to transfer as well. The scoby floated right back to the top of my jar, hung midway in the new smaller jar. I'll keep an eye on the formation of both.

I let this batch go a few days without doing anything, and it got vinegary. I drained some off so I wasn't starting the new batch with a ton of vinegar, but I think I still started it with a lot of vinegar. If it tastes bad I can drain it off and start over.

Starting this back up. I just threw out about 3 pounds of scoby that had grown, leaving enough to start a small batch. Targeting a 1 gallon jar, so I'm going to 3.4L of water, mix in a bunch of tea and sugar, then let it sit overnight before mixing in the scoby and 1+ old "kombucha" vinegar.

Time to start fresh.

New scoby from Amelia.

I picked it up last night and spilled it all over my backpack. Sadly I lost a lot of the kombucha that should've gone towards spiking this batch. I biked it home (fingers crossed that it didn't freeze) and started it last night.

Tea from Verdant

Zhu Rong Yunnan Black
1 filter bag packed full : 23g
Bowl : 10 cups of 180° water (tea says it should be 205, next time I'll heat it another way)

2 ounces. I used steeping bag packed full. Steeped two glass bowls for about 5 minutes each, in sequence. The woman I talked to at Verdant said I should use 4oz of tea in one batch, and that blew my mind. If that's true I've always made it far too weak, this time too. Their tea is fancy and expensive so I didn't want to blow it all on my first batch.

I stirred 4 cups of sugar into 20 cups of tea. Once dissolved I filled the jar to just under the shoulder with cold, carbon filtered water, stirred once or twice, and dumped in the scoby.

Vessel

Renee gave me a sweet 3 gallon glass jar with a spigot, so it went in that. The spigot has both metal and plastic, neither of which are supposed to be great for kombucha. I'm hoping the ease of pouring out a taste daily will tighten the feedback loop.

Brew

I'm going to keep it where I walk past and look at it a few times a day. For now it's by the door. I plan to taste a bit every day and watch for the top to film over.

I got going on this a while ago, fizzled. Here's what I wrote down. I managed a few batches that were really good, the best bottled with hibiscus and a enough sugar that it really fizzed. Friends who tasted it were impressed.

Did another batch. 12 cheap ("tetley") tea bags. I steeped all 12 in the same 1.7L of 212º water, where previously I've always done 2x1.7L with half of the tea in each. We'll see if it makes a difference, I'm guessing it won't.

I'm off for the weekend, so I hope it hasn't gone too far by sunday.

I'm going to go all in this time. Twice the tea. 2 x 30g satchets of laoshan black?.

To get the hot sugary tea down to room temperature I tried something new: brew two 1.7L (that's how much water my electric kettle can boil) batches of tea, put half the sugar in each, then fill the rest with filtered water. When all the hot water and tea are brewed in the same vessel there isn't enough room left for cold water in the bowl. Chilling it in an ice bath is a pain. The fridge/freezer is slow.

I added too much cold water however, so I had to dump 1/8 of the second container into the scoby hotel.

I drained off a lot more of the dregs from #6 because of how vinegary they are. The last batch got too strong too fast. I cleaned out my other big glass jar and started a 'scoby hotel'. Most of batch #6 went in there. I reserved the good stuff at the very bottom with all the brown bits (yeast?) in a glass bowl, cleaned out my spigot`ed jar, and dumped them back in.

I split the scoby in half and put the older, bottom half into the hotel. The top half will brew this batch. I'm headed out of town for the weekend so I'd rather it go slow than fast.

It's covered back up and tastes like sugary tea. I'm not sure about the flavor of this tea, but it will be fine. Next time I'm going back to cheap tea though, $15 for one batch is too steep.

The hardest part of the brewing process is lugging the full, refreshed jar back to where it sits in my room. From downstairs I can either walk directly up the stairs with two latching fire doors in my way or go the long way around for about 10x as much walking. The full jar is heavy, so pausing and balancing all the weight in one hand is a workout. It worked well to put the jar in a milk crate and use the handles on that to carry. I didn't spill anything, which is better than I did last time as it sloshed around in the jar.

Starting another tonight. This time english breakfast tea from the co-op, 46g brewed in two batches. 5 cups sugar, so halfway between #2 and #3. The water boiled to 212º[^1] in an electric kettle instead of coming out of the coffee machine as the last two times.

[^1] 212 per the screen on the kettle, I didn't check it with a thermometer.

Scoby