It’s super simple to make your own kombucha tea, which is awesome because the store bought sort can be super expensive. When you make kombucha, you’re basically hopping up a colony of healthy bacteria with sugar and caffeine. All you need to whip up a batch of your own kombucha tea is sugar, black or green tea bags, and a SCOBY (more on the SCOBY below!).
Kombucha tea is full of health benefits. This fermented food has lots of “good” bacterial, sort of like you’d find in yogurt, which is excellent for digestion. It also contains lots of B vitamins and vitamin C!
Kombucha Tea Recipe
Ingredients
- 1 gallon container with a lid
- SCOBY – you can get one from a friend or make your own
- 4 bags of green or black tea – you can experiment with different teas, as long as the tea you use is caffeinated.
- 1 cup of sugar
- 1 gallon of water
- cheese cloth or a cloth napkin
- rubber band
Directions
- Boil your water, then combine it with the tea bags and the sugar in your container. You want to steep your tea for at least half an hour. Once the tea is steeped, you’ll need to wait until the water gets down to room temperature, so you won’t damage your SCOBY!
- Drop the SCOBY into the tea mixture, cover the container with cheese cloth, and rubber band it shut.
- Stick the container in a cool, dark place, like the back of a cabinet, and let it steep for 10 days.
- Once your kombucha is ready, transfer the SCOBY along with enough kombucha to cover it to a separate container, put the lid on your kombucha container and refrigerate it.
That’s it! You’re ready to enjoy tasty, homemade kombucha tea. Sometimes when you’re making kombucha your SCOBY will multiply. If it does, you can hook up a friend who wants to start brewing her own kombucha!
Finding a SCOBY
The real trick to making kombucha at home is getting your hands on a SCOBY. Here are a few resources:
- Phone a friend. Got a friend who makes kombucha? Ask if she has an extra SCOBY or even if she can cut you off part of hers.
- Buy one. Gem Cultures sells SCOBY starters.
- Make one. You can actually make a SCOBY! The folks at Food Renegade have deets on how to do it.
Have any of you guys made your own kombucha tea? What kind of tea did you use, and how did it turn out?