My Brewing Project: Kombucha

Yeah I’m on that Kombucha trend, lemme just get that out of the way.

But it’s not what you think! I swear!

I’ve been brewing Kombucha on and off for about a 2 years until now. Just some hobby/project thing that my interest would increase or decrease depending on my mood. Being in California for 4 years it was something I was pretty familiar with but was never that into. To be honest I found a lot of kombucha to be really sour, almost like vinegar to a point where it was hard for me to take a second sip.

Yet because of how easy it was to make into a little DIY project, I picked a SCOBY up online once I moved to Omori and tried brewing the stuff.

Here are some of my first attempts at making kombucha, and they turned out fine. I would brew the sugary tea, leave the SCOBY in it at room temperature in my hallway for a week, bottle it with some juice or herbs. Yet I never really loved the flavors I was getting, I felt like they would get some funky off flavors or I would get lazy and forget to brew more tea and leave the thing alone for months on end. One time, though I ended up putting some hop pellets in one of my kombucha and it was probably the best tasting one I made. However, alas I forgot my SCOBY in the bottle for a solid year and my kombucha brewing days were on a hiatus.

Then for some reason the inspiration hit me again this year

I think it may have been my work with producing craft beer for my town of Omori that lit the spark. I liked the whole brewing scene but you can’t home-brew in Japan, and it was such a bore waiting a month for the beer to ferment. I wanted to try out more flavorings and feel like I was making something instead of just relying on the brewer through contract brewing. Thus my kombucha adventure started…

I built my own little fermentor so that I could make kombucha consistently, and even made my own labels to sell (for a fair price of course) to friends around town. Currently my main komucha is an apple juice and dry hopped black tea kombucha which tastes almost like grapefruit juice. I”m also working on a green tea kombucha and a kuromoji tea (tea made from a local tree) kombucha.

Compared to when I first started to make kombucha I know have a lot of knowledge about making fermented beverages from my work involving craft beer. So even though I can’t make home-brew beer in Japan, I can use the knowledge gained from work for my kombucha.

My current issue that I am trying to overcome is how to successfully add carbonation to the kombucha in secondary fermentation. At the moment it seems like a combination of how much juice/sugar I put in as well as the temperature that I leave the bottles in.

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