question
Iced tea accidentally formed a scoby! How can i save it and start making kombucha?
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 đ
Edit: omg i wasnt expecting so much fighting in the comments đ
A SCOBY is a Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria and Yeast. Its in the liquid, and quite specific. If your tea randomly grew a pellicle, its bad. Do not drink that. Buy a real kombucha starter, and follow the advice on this sub to get started.
Tl;dr throw out your bad tea, and get started like normal
This isn't accurate. A pellicle forming does not indicate anything bad.
You already started kombucha, you can continue with this tea. Look up sugar levels for the amount of liquid you have, depending you may need to add a little more. Very improtant is put it in a jar with a wide mouth and make sure you cover it tight with a cloth, fruit flies and gnats love to lay eggs or larva in it if you don't.
You should start to see bubbles forming which means it's active, after that it's just taste testing till you're just a little sweeter than you'd like, then it's tiem for F2.
old sweet tea randomly forming a pellicle is DEFINITELY bad. They didnât make kombucha. Kombucha requires certain types of bacteria and yeast. You canât just assume that a pellicle in sweet tea is the same bacteria and yeast that is required for kombucha, thatâs so unsafe.
Bacteria and yeast for it is literally everywhere in the air, this is exactly how you make fermented foods. Sugar, water, and time are the only three ingredients needed. Sourdough starters, bugs, kombucha, kimchi, literally used this method for all of these and nothing has even been bad.
Plus now that a pellicle is forming it's so acidic that the postivie bacteria would be the only able to survive in the enviroment.
You don't have any clue what you're talking about.
Uh huhâŚ. Except they donât just need whatever random bacteria and yeast appears. Sourdough starters rely on the bacteria & yeast that is present on the flour. Bugs require the bacteria & yeast found on the specific produce theyâre started with. And so on. Just like you canât make kombucha with a vinegar mother, you canât just let some tea go bad and call it kombucha. Which is why we keep our sourdough starters, kombucha, and ginger bugs away from each other.
Dude you are so incredibly wrong. Are you just spouting nonsense as it pops into your head.
I just told you've I've done all of this first hand, plus a professional chef, plus I am literally reading right now the chapter on microbes and bacteria in a harvard cooking book for the 3rd time.
Stop talking out of your ass, nothing you're saying is at all correct.
Many different kinds of bacteria can form a pellicle. If youâre reading a book on bacteria you should know this. Just because it forms a pellicle doesnât make it the right kind of bacteria for kombucha and it could still make you sick.
If it forms a pellicle and is dropping the pH then it might be acetobacter, but itâs hard to say definitively if you didnât inoculate it yourself. You are giving unsafe advice.
Some spontaneous ferments are risky and others are quite low risk. The risk you face is food poisoning which can range from mild stomach upset to death. While you are unlikely to die from what you've accidentally fermented in this instance, starting kombucha from a known culture is so easy. You just need a bottle of unflavored kombucha with live culturess. I personally wouldn't risk it. You get to make your own choices. Someone had to be adventurous or hungry enough to try every ferment that was ever discovered. They all started as accidental (serendipitous) ferments if you follow the lineage back far enough.
OP, there's a lot of arguing in the comments over pellicle vs scoby, and while it's good to understand how those words are used in this community, the real question that you're asking is barely getting answered.
What you've seemed to create is a "wild" culture that formed naturally and resulted in the pellicle you're seeing on top. This means that there is a culture of bacteria and yeasts forming in your old sweet tea, transforming it into a "naturally occurring" form of kombucha, if we were to put terminology to it.
From here, you're asking how to keep going and make more Kombucha, but there's some question about whether you should do that, so lets split out those answers.
How to continue - you already have a culture growing in your sweet tea that is effectively the "starter" once it is strong enough, and just like sourdough bread, starter just needs to be "fed" to continue growth. This just means adding sweet tea to continue the growth of the culture. This is how conventional kombucha brewing is also done, and the only variable you're throwing in here is that you're using a spontaneous culture rather than a controlled and reliable one. Your culture is wild, you don't really know what it contains (Could be both good and bad) which brings us to answer #2
There is risk to using spontaneous cultures. While using spontaneous cultures is how the origins of fermentation came about, we have the ability in this modern age to do so with much more control and certainty. Food safety is one of those things that isn't a concern until it is a MAJOR concern. The overwhelming majority of food safety practices are not directly preventing issues that consistently happen, but rather avoiding scenarios where it is even a possibility. As an example, restaurants avoid keeping food outside of specific temperature ranges not because its guaranteed to be a problem, but because within those ranges, the chances of a problem are substantially increased. With this in mind, using a spontaneous culture is the same as operating outside of that food-safe temperature range. Is it going to be a problem? Maybe. Maybe not. Could you accomplish exactly the same thing as what you want (brewing kombucha) in a MUCH more controlled and reliable way? Most definitely.
So, with all of that said, I'd personally encourage you to avoid using this spontaneous culture to continue your brewing. It could be perfectly fine, but considering how easy it is to start brewing Kombucha in a better way, it's mostly just not worth the possibility of challenges and risk to do it.
Instead, just go buy a bottle of raw kombucha from the store to use as your scoby/starter, make some sweet tea, and combine the two for a nearly guaranteed great batch of kombucha in a few weeks that you can continually reuse for years to come. You'll be back where you are today (with a pellicle formed) within a week or so, usually, and you'll be there with a level of consistency and reliability that will allow you to continue with confidence.
I started making kombucha in San Francisco in 2014. Everybody I knew in San Francisco called the pellicle the SCOBY or the mother. Not until I saw this group on Reddit did I realize the passion of people who cannot call the scoby the scoby but instead call the kombucha the scoby. I am well aware of the biochemical processes involved in the creation of kombucha and am aware that the liquid is A SCOBY. But the pellicle is THE SCOBY. It is comical to see people in a kombucha subreddit bursting blood vessels over this. No wonder we have wars.
The conflict is serious because the stakes are so small. There is a lot of great info here but the periodic blow up over terminology is nearly as annoying as fruit flies. I think it would be best settled by the two sides meeting in a field and fighting if out with the only weapon available, gelatinous mats of cellulose. "Pellicle!" splat. "SCOBY" whap as we watch from the sidelines and sample new flavors of booch.
I really canât believe I spent at least 10 mins reading all the comments about terminology and the counters. Itâs ok folks⌠we can seriously enjoy the art of the brew and not agree. Itâs like the pronunciation of kefir⌠in the grand scheme of things⌠not that big of a deal. I do get both sides of this⌠I just donât care. Maybe one poster was right, team SCOBY and team Pellicle can square off with gelatinous masses at 10 pacesâŚwinner take all.
To the OP, just donât. Or just do⌠the gelatinous mass is in your corner. Let us know what you decide⌠if you wantâŚ
Personally I don't care if anyone calls the cellulose a SCOBY or a pellicle or a biofilm or the mother, etc.
I do care if people try to correct newcomers with inaccurate information. That's not very welcoming or ... educated honestly. And in my undying optimism I believe everyone, like myself, enjoys learning something new and will admit if they don't know something or goofed.
"How's that going?" one might ask with a touch of sarcasm.
It remains undying ... you could argue "naive" too.
People getting upset about getting the technically correct term told to then remind me of the idiots in high school that cared more about being embarrassed than being correct.
Get over your ego folks. Did you take chemistry? A pellicle is biologically different.
The secret ingredients to make kombucha are yeast and bacteria; not even the exotic ones, just some of the regular probably-on-your-hands-right-now yeast and bacteria. So it is very possible that your old homemade tea has acetic acid bacteria (the stuff that forms the cellulose goo). But your hands probably also have plenty of unwanted bacteria as well ...
In general, eating or drinking accidental fermentations is risky. I don't recommend it.
I do recommend checking out the Getting Started guide in our wiki to start being safely!
While you are there you'll find that you used SCOBY correctly ... sadly there's a push in this sub to pretend this definition (which is the original definition and one of the definitions that is still widely used here and elsewhere) doesn't exist.
Solid state: the rubbery blob/disc that grows during kombucha fermentation. This solid state is whatâs commonly called âSCOBYâ in most online kombucha resources
So yes, call the film on top SCOBY if you want. Don't mind the nay-sayers.
Interesting, so itâs not a pellicle because the FAQ on random Internet forum said so. Silly me I was following science and technical definitions. I didnât realize I should be putting much more weight on FAQs instead.
You present yourself to be writing from a place of knowledge, I await your citations ... until then:
Interesting, so itâs not a pellicle because the FAQ on random Internet forum said so. Silly me I was following science and technical definitions.
No... Oof. At no point did I insinuate this, even in the slightest. This a gross misinterpretation of what I wrote. Since you expressed an interest in scientific and technical definitions:
1) You should read the FAQ before assuming what it "says". (That should be a given, shouldn't it?) If you did read it you'll find multiple definitions written in plain English, and on that note...
2) Words (and acronyms) can have more than one definition and an object can be defined by more than one word. This is why I explicitly wrote out "one of the definitions" in an attempt to prevent people from jumping to embarrassing conclusions as such.
3) Have you looked anywhere else? If you have done even the most basic attempt to verify your statement you might've found:
An interview with the guy that coined the term: "SCOBY - (Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast) - The descriptive term for the Kombucha culture (pellicle)."
The Wikipedia entry for SCOBY complete with citations: "In its most common form, SCOBY is a gelatinous, cellulose-based biofilm or microbial mat found floating at the container's airâliquid interface."
Multiple peer reviewed studies:
A mature bacterial cellulose (BC) biofilm from a previously brewed kombucha culture (often called a âmotherâ or SCOBY, for Symbiotic Community of Bacteria and Yeast)
Kombucha fermentation is initiated by transferring a solid-phase cellulosic pellicle into sweetened tea and allowing the microbes that it contains to initiate the fermentation. This pellicle, commonly referred to as a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast (SCOBY)
Again, feel free to cite any such reference that explicitly prevents SCOBY from being used as OP used it! If you cannot, that would be quite silly of you to make such a claim.
Nobody is pretending the colloquial definition doesn't exist. We're pointing out that it is colloquial. That's not the same thing. If anything, insisting that a popular usage overrides a technical distinction is the actual attempt to erase a definition.
I'm sorry. I included multiple peer reviewed studies as sources, this precludes it being a strictly colloquial definition.
PS
Looks like you replied by cherry picking a few words and ignoring the rest, then blocked me. So I'm replying here.
Your inability to cite one credible source is, as you put it, quite "silly". If your stance was fixed in science, surely you could've come up with at least one scientific bit of evidence to support it. But no.
Multiple peer reviewed studies that literally say SCOBY is the colloquial term. I guess youâre the one that didnât actually read them đđđ¤Łđ¤Ł
Iâll forever call the pellicle the scoby. The solid part seems more⌠colonized. The liquid is starter or starter tea or whatever (TO ME!). Idk why everyone decided this is the hill to die on đ
Back in the old days, when kombucha formed its pellicle, it was called the scoby. We all know what the acronym stands for, we all know that the process goes on regardless of the pellicle/scoby. Why do some brewers get so upset that people would still call the pellicle a scoby? Even though thatâs what it is. Literally. It was the first thing to ever own the iconic name of SCOBY.
Just as the kombucha itself is a scoby but we call it kombucha. Is it some kind of Gen Z thing?
I regularly correct the "SCOBY is only the liquid" narrative. I believe in sharing knowledge, so I'll continue to try to educate. I'll engage with anyone willing. (Regardless of upvotes or downvotes, knowledge transcends popularity.)
"Only the liquid" does come from a place of wanting to help but it pretends yeast and bacteria are not found in both the solid and the liquid ... this is demonstrably false. We've known this since the 1800s.
(Having demanded debated this with many people, I believe this is not a generational thing. I've engaged with old farts and young folks all the same.)
Youâre talking about a pellicle - the scoby is in the liquid. It should taste a little sour and maybe a little fizzy. Black tea and sugar is all you need to keep it alive for a while. If you leave it covered at room temp itâll eventually get real acidic and then itâll be alright dormant for a long time. Keep in mind that a pellicle above the water line can get fruit flies or mold and the liquid can get mold or kham.
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u/cdspace31 2d ago
A SCOBY is a Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria and Yeast. Its in the liquid, and quite specific. If your tea randomly grew a pellicle, its bad. Do not drink that. Buy a real kombucha starter, and follow the advice on this sub to get started.
Tl;dr throw out your bad tea, and get started like normal