/ck/ - Food & Cooking

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I grew my own scoby, it took about a month to get going but once it's set and you start making batches of kombucha it'll get pretty healthy.

The standard way to make kombucha is essentially making sweet black tea (cold) and dropping in the scoby. To grow one, you make the same sweet black tea and pour in a bottle of plain unflavored raw kombucha. If it's flavored, it might muck up the bacterial balance and if it's not raw, they're dead.

I made mine with a bottle of GTs, which you can get pretty much anywhere. It'll grow fastest if it's dark and slightly warm. Make sure you keep it in glass and cover it with something breathable, I just use coffee filters with a rubber band.

Depend on where you live, there may be some local hippies giving out scobies on Craigslist too.

>>12522644
You can order it off amazon as well which is what sparked my interest.

Do different scoby give off different flavors? Is it like yeast in that sense?

>>12522172
Get out while you can. The marxist homosexualist fermentation cult is impossible to leave willingly.

>>12522172
Never made it from scratch myself, but I had a friends batch and it was okay. Not good but not at all bad. I can be persuaded to try again if the batch is guaranteed good, otherwise I just avoid.

>>12522172
I bought my initial scoby off of Amazon and I've been using it/its offspring for a year now. You can grow one from scratch using a bottle of store bought kombucha, but it's more hassle than it's worth. Kombucha is an easy ferment, so you should be good to go with your experience and one of the billion tutorials that are out there. Expect about a week for 1F and 2-3 days for 2F depending on how warm your apartment is.

>>12522823
>Do different scoby give off different flavors? Is it like yeast in that sense?
Different flavors mostly come from the sugar you add during 2F, and to a lesser extent the tea and sugar in 1F. Citrus, mango, and pomegranate juices tend to work well, or if you want a syrup I recommend agave. Spiced juices tend to taste like ass.

>>12523518
>Fermentation destroys phytoestrogens
>Is somehow still a marxist homosexualist cult

>>12523997
>implying estrogen causes faggotry and marxist idealism
Get fucked misogynist picklefurry

You can just buy commercial unflavored kombucha from the grocery store to start a brew. there's enough live yeast and bacteria in there that it'll grow into a scoby over a week or two.

>>12522823
The flavor comes mostly from the tea and sugar. Usually you add flavorings after brewing, so they don't contaminate your main batch.

Start with a good culture. Kombuchamama is where I picked mine up. Don't grow out of a bottle unless you wait to wait a month for a weak beta culture.

>>12524304
>Don't grow out of a bottle unless you wait to wait a month for a weak beta culture.
It took me a few readings to figure out what you meant, but I get it now. I don't want this confused anime girl to go to waste, so you can have her.

>>12524338
Yeah my b. This dumb hippy knows what she's doing. I've given away tons of scoby over the years off her original culture, it's good shit. Order from her, pick up a gallon of pickles for the jar, and find some swing top bottles from imported lemonade. Absolute cheapest way to start. Bottle early, flavor the secondary fermentation with fresh fruit or flavored simple syrup you've cooked up. One of my go-to flavors is mixed frozen berries and bottled lemon juice.