Entry
Making Kombucha

Fermentation or something

Healthy for you, they say, easy, they say, makes you grow to more than 2 meters tall, they say. Summer is the time to try alchemy again. I follow more or less this how to make kombucha recipe. Seems easy, you build a scoby, feed it tea, collect kombucha, put it in bottles, make sure they don't explode, profit.

Log of events

Setup

The hardest thing when growing your own scoby seems buying the "right" kombucha.

• Non pasteurized
• Non flavoured I found a bottle of greentea-kombucha that might be suitable in a store selling organic goods.

Next quest: Finding big enough jars to build a home-kombucha factory. While this seemed tricky at first, I found 3-4 suitable ones in one supermarket. Living in Switzerland? I suggest you go to Coop. I went for one with a little spout to better fill bottles with the strategy to use it as a water dispenser at parties should everything go wrong.

2026-03-23 Building a scoby, first try

After boiling water, already steeping tee in sweet water, I destroyed the big jar during cleaning with hot water. Sadly, shops are already closed over the long weekend. Time to make ice-tea. Or just using a smaller 1l glass from the basement. I hope the scoby does not need "enough" tea, even though I believe that less added kombucha might reduce the probability of success. Let's see how this develops.

2026-06-24 Update

No Scoby grow - the tea developed a layer, but it's improbable, that this is a scoby. Based on the instructions, a scoby should be present. This might either be related to the base drink (green tea is not recommendet for growing a scoby), to not having enough black tea, or to something completely different, like heat, chance and so on.

2026-09-12 Buying a pet

In hindsight, maybe the skin on top was a veeery thiny Scoby. After the summer holidays, I bought a Scoby on the internet. It was delivered in a bag with some starter Kombucha - a thin disc of 10cm in diameter. I've been using this to successfully make Kombucha twice already.

The small disc sank to the ground of the brewing pot both times, and a thin film grew on the top of the tea. Initially I thought this was yeast, and threw it away (still drinking the Kombucha - apparently yeast can only change the taste). The second time I pulled it out with the starter scoby. It's now fermenting tea with his mom.

My fermenting glass is a bit wide and the new scoby has the size of a breakfast plate.

Flavours tested so far:

• Apple smells a bit like apple vinegar, but tastes good. Not too many bubbles.
• Sour cherries has a good taste and a lot more fizz. The bottles need burping daily.

Sidenote

Apparently, making Kombucha at an industrial scale is done in Switzerland for like 10 years now. The brewers also started doing soft drinks and seem to be behind the current Mate boom.

Looking for a better marker