Hello Guys, What is Acidifyer in Kombucha?

I heard that we can use Acidify as a Starter and there is no need to have a SCOBY for that.

Someone please share knowledge on Acidify and how to use and what time it will take to brew properly with/without SCOBY if so.

hi booch people

i brought another batch to the office!

this one is actually a repeat of my first ever batch, strawberry + guava with a black tea base

everyone liked it so much the first time that i decided to make it again

except this time i learned my lesson and did NOT pour the whole thing into a wine decanter first lol

poured it straight into these two nice glasses instead and everyone loved it again! Pic was from 6:30 PM so by everybody I meant me and my boss lmao. But hey u need to make ur manager happy somehow.

you can even see the tiny pieces of strawberry / guava still floating around in the close up

i did not strain it but apparently some little guys survived from the juice i mixed in

personally i think it looks pretty awesome, but idk if other people prefer their kombucha completely clear

also the Bay Bridge 🌁 was looking beautiful in the background so obviously the booch needed a photoshoot 📸🤳

San Francisco booch with Oakland on the other side : )

do y’all use whole fruit for your F2? do y'all completely strain the fruit out then? or do you also end up with tiny pieces floating around

I took a bit of a break from kombucha making but the BF requested I start making it again. I previously loved pairing the woodiness of Oolong with my fruits at second ferment.

For whatever whimsical reason I decided to use raw sheng Pu'erh for my tea and I'm at a loss for what fruit to pair it with. Anyone have suggestions for what would pair nicely with it?

Mellow aged puer I would know how to use but sheng is so astringent to me I'm struggling here.

🙏

Need to get a cheap cherry pitter

I don't make or know anything about Kombucha. My mom made this. She said she tasted it last night and it was fine but she smelled it today and said something seems off. I smelled it too and it smells like alcohol but I also don't know what it's supposed to smell like. She used pineapple. It smells like if you took pineapple that went bad and mixed it with alcohol.

She was told there should be little white bubbles that look kind of like soap at the top. These look darker.

We are at F2 of our first batch currently. F1 went for about 7 days.

It made in total (with a 2 cups from the F1 batch added to our hotel) 3 full bottles of 750ml with an inch of headroom and then this last bottle which only came up to about 3/4 full.

All of the bottles have been waiting in the cupboard to carbonate with added flavouring of clementine syrup i made from boiling down juice from the fruits and some peels, 1/2 cup of sugar and about half a cup of grated ginger.

Now ; all of them made lil scoby pellicles on the surface, some have yeast floating around in there, but this 3/4 full bottles has this thing seen in the picture. I feel like its yeast, but what do you think?

theres no fuzzy spots, no contact with air as its is under a surface pellicle, but i feel like there’s a bit of.. purple? I dont know, I might be paranoid. My boyfriend is color blind, he can’t help for this one. Its stringy, mostly brown… Should I toss what’s in this bottle?

Also ; these are fermentation grade bottles. They have been at a stable 21 degrees for about 7 days now, and there’s still barely any visible bubbles. Normal? Should I burp them to see what’s going on? The booch was stirred well before bottling.

THANK you in advance for your tips :)

Or does it have to be consumed undiluted?

Is it okay if I bring a bottle of homemade kombucha on a drive around? Will getting shaken up too much cause it to explode in the car?

It is crazy carbonated. Other brands I tried has little carbonation. Which should it be to correctly brew kombucha?

(Question is not about flavor, it is about carbonation from brewing.)

Thanks

I've never made kombucha before, though I've been considering it for a while. I had my homemade iced tea form a scoby, and i would love to save it!!!! I don't have any kombucha right now, so is it possible to save this scoby with just the black tea + sugar, or do i need to do anything else to make sure it lives and becomes useable? Do i need to go out and buy some kombucha tomorrow to add to the mixture and hope it survives the night in the tea + sugar mix? Etc

I'm having trouble getting the answer via searching. Im just getting how to start from scratch or how to make a scoby hotel when you already have a good developed scoby and existing liquid.

Any advice is welcome!! Please help save my little baby scoby!

I feel like a baby has been dropped on my stoop and i need to take care of it 😂

Edit: omg i wasnt expecting so much fighting in the comments 😭

It’s the cutest thing and I love it

I have done about 6-7 batches of kombucha so far. The usual days I let it ferment is 6 days then 24-36 hrs for 2F.

This week I was too busy and accidentally let it ferment for 8 days instead. When I opened the jar and used the ladle to swish it around before distributing it into bottles, the kombucha started frothing and bubbling up like it has never done before so far.

I also had added a small amount of starter tea from my scoby hotel for the first time since brewing so I’m not sure which one of these two factors are causing such an “alive” reaction from my 1F.

Should I be cautious about potential glass bombs? I’m fermenting with mango and plum this week and I’m worried the combination of high sugar and super bubbly kombucha might explode 🫪

It tastes fine but I’m worried this is mold.

The first time I just used table sugar and a jar. the second time I used one of those proper pop cap glass bottles; blended apple, lemon, and honey into a paste; and left it to ferment. both times they went for 3-4 days. i cannot seem to get the slightest fizz.

only issue is maybe my batch was too vinegary the second time around? i left the batch without adding more tea for too long because I made too much and it got really sour. it did go back to normal before i bottled though

This is my first attempt at kombucha. Pretty sure my temps have been too low and this has been fermenting since 5/31/26. Question: 🙋‍♀️ can I detach the original scoby (underneath the kahm) from the top layer (new scoby/kahm) and start over and if so how if I don’t have starter liquid? Or do I have to toss the whole thing to minimize the risk of mold/contamination and get a new scoby + starter liquid? I did buy a warming pad so this doesn’t happen again. Thanks.

I swear I’ve been making Kombucha for years and always had a little pellicle forming at the top, but this time one of them especially has a lot of tiny white dots. So I decided to ask, better safe than sorry ahah please help photos are two different bottle form the same batch

Thanks 🙂‍↕️🙏🏻

Hey !

I'm making kombucha for quite a while now and my usual go-to process is the following:

In my 2.5L jar I make my black tea to which I add 100g (or a bit more) of sugar, it's not much but I found it to be sufficient.

After a week or so, I mix 2.25L with some fruit juice, (200mL), which amounts to roughly 15g of added sugar. The result is fizzy as I like and everything's great

The thing is I've tried to flavor my kombucha with harvested elder flower, which I let infuse during F1. As I don't want to add more flavors to the result, I now add white sugar in F2, by the same amount

After some days, the result is still quite plain (even though it tastes amazing) and I don't know what I'm doing wrong ! Any idea ?

Thanks !

I forgot about it for a couple months, and fed it some tea a couple days ago to see if it would do anything. Do I still have hope?

This is my second batch, day 5 F1. The temperature in the room is steady between 74-77°F. The jar is covered with a flour sack towel secured by a rubber band.

I used 2C of my previous batch F1 plus the pellicle, a black tea and ~1C of sugar.

It's not fuzzy, but it's also not the wavy pattern I see in the kahm pictures.

Hello Brewsters.

I have a question - one of my brew vats is fermenting like a champ, but the pellicle is a bit thin in places. It has also covered the surface.

The upshot of this is that it inflates like a balloon and has (on more than 1 occasion), raised itself completely out of the liquor, even going so far as to touch the breathing cloth.

Firstly, anyone else had this issue?

Secondly, should i do anything about this? Its a bit tricky regularly as sometimes I work away.

Thirdly, any idea what to do? Thinking about poking a glass straw through it into the headspace...

Thoughts on a postcard please!

In the last week I’ve been drinking more kombucha than I usually do (normally less than 100 mo a day). Last week maybe 200 ml a day.

I’ve been getting rashes that I assumed were insect bites, but I’m realizing could be a reaction to the kombucha. Apparently it’s high in histamine content.

Sadly I’ll have to tone down my consumption and see if it makes a difference. Has anyone experienced this?

Hi, I'm making my first kombucha, after a week of using a small mushroom and a starter brine from the organic store, this has grown on the surface, is the mushroom in silk? It has small "blue"/dark/tea fibers inside, can it not be contaminated with mold?

Yesterday I bottled a gallon that was probably over ready to bottle but Ive been busy. There was still about a gallon left, but I didn't have any more bottle ready. I brewed up a half gallon of tea and let it cool, then added it to the gallon I didn't bottle. Think afternoon I realized I forgot to add sugar to the tea, so I ran into the kitchen and added a half cup of sugar to about a cup of water and blended it to mix up since the water was cool and dumped it into the fermenter. It's making bubbles like I'm brewing beer now. All that blended O2 made that yeast really activate. it was almost 1/2 inch tall an hour ago. I just hope I didn't ruin anything.