Drinking Kombucha
Hello reader, I find it a pleasure to be able to share my many thoughts on kombucha tea with whomever may find it of interest.
Today I was thinking about the flexibility of the KT beverage. There are very few drinks that can be catered to the drinker to such a high degree of customization. The way I see it, there is not a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to make kombucha, just the continued discovery of personal preference. I will seek with this website to talk about my own results and preferences as just one of many tastes, and make sure to include other information for those who may want to brew a different kind of KT than I do.
Here are some of the general guidelines I am familiar with when I brew tea or if I am going to make a custom batch for a friend or family member.
Vinegar Taste
The vinegar taste of kombucha is perhaps one of its most defining qualities. Usually based on this alone, people will determine if they can drink KT or if its just not for them. Therefore its important for home brewers to know how to control this to some degree when needed.
The keys:
You can mask the vinegar taste whatever your batch turns out to be by means of the double fermentation method, this is for more experienced brewers.
Lengthening or shortening the number of days in the brew cycle is the easiest and most reliable way to control how sweet you want your KT to be. Feel free to test this yourself, but I would taste test my tea for being on the sweeter side, probably around day 10. Going for more less sweet or none at all, stay with the recommended 14 days or even longer if needed.
The number of days will vary since kombucha like to stay between 74 and 84 degrees, the higher in that temperature range the faster it will brew. Even if you find a good time frame its a good practice to fine tune your batch length as the season changes. In Phoenix AZ where I live, the summers can be 120 during the day, so 80° will be what our house is, in the winter we will certainly only warm the house up to the bottom of that range at 74°.