Plastic Art or Kombucha Fail?
Wanna play a game!? It's called Plastic Art or Kombucha Fail. I'll show you a picture and you guess if it's art or fail.
My Kombucha brewing was going so well. I am pretty sure that I got the brewing part down. I am making fermented tea and not killing anyone. My scoby looks good, well as good as a scoby can look anyway (I'll get to that later). The flavoring of the tea is a little tricky, mostly because it is trail and error until I find combinations and amounts that taste good to us.
I bought this plastic container so I could brew a gallon instead of a half gallon in two mason jars. Purely a convenience thing. I just wanted it to all be in the same place and I wanted to be able to brew A LOT of tea. I like having it available and a half gallon doesn't last long with 3 to 4 of us drinking it. Tonight, I was ready to use it. My last batch of tea was ready to be flavored, which means I need to start a new batch. I boil my water. I put my sugar in the container. I get my 8 tea bags ready. I pour the water into the container. The container melts... #facepalm. Seriously, that did not pan out
Oh well! Lesson learned. DO NOT put boiling water in a plastic container not meant for boiling water. Yeah I know, I should have already known that. Whatever. On the bright side, I saved the tea. I will have to make it in my quart jars, but at least I am still making it.
This whole Kombucha thing has overall been a great experience. I like science, and just growing my own SCOBY for brewing was pretty freaking amazing. I don't pretend to know what it is, all I know is that it is needed to make Kombucha and I know that you need to keep brewing for the scoby to be healthy and I know that metal should NOT be used for fermenting. Again, I do not pretend to know why. I would like to buy a brewing book and read more about it, so that I really understand it rather than working off of other peoples recipes. If you like Kombucha, and science, and you don't mind waiting a month and 7 days to drink your first homemade Kombucha... you should totally give it a try. If you don't, I suppose you could just go get some from the organic cold section of Kroger.
I did a lot of research but I found this website to be the most helpful. I found that her ratio of 1 cup sugar, 8 tea bags, and 2 cups starter tea per gallon is fairly consistent in all the other recipes I looked at too; this makes it easy to scale up or down (unless you have a weak plastic container #facepalm). The flavoring is a definitely something I need to work on, especially when it comes to the herbs and spices, I tend to put more in than necessary and the flavor overpowers all the fruit. Science! I am taking notes now so I know that I can recreate the flavor and tweak it if necessary!!
