Kombucha

Contents

• Ratios
• 2 Gallon Continuous Brew
• Bottle finishing
• Brew notes

Ratios

The most important ratio is probably finished kombucha to sweet tea. This ratio is 9:1, sweet tea to fermented tea.¹

In the ratios above, a 7:1 ratio is used instead of 9:1 for ease of measuring. More kombucha at the start means a faster ferment and a lower pH that is less conducive to contaminants.

2 Gallon Continuous Brew Recipe (F1, or first fermentation)

With a continuous brew set up, you're always starting with a lot more kombucha than 2 cups. I wouldn't siphon off more than half at any point. Starting with well washed and cleaned equipment and hands, the steps are:

1. Bring 4 cups of water to a boil in a pot.
2. Remove from heat, add your tea and let steep for 6 minutes.
3. Add sugar to a large bowl.
4. Pour tea from pot into bowl, straining the tea if necessary.
5. Stir until sugar is dissolved.
6. Add 2 cups of water to your sweet tea to cool it down. I do this to avoid pouring near boiling water into the fermentation vessel - I'm always afraid I'll thermally shock it and ruin it.
7. Pour your sweet tea into the fermentation vessel and add the remaining water (here, you've used 6 cups of 28 cups total - so add remaining 22 cups, or 11 pints).
8. If you've got a thermometer, you can check the temperature of everything - I'm usually around 70 deg F here.
9. Add the finished kombucha - you probably don't need to stir it, but you can if you'd like to.
10. Stick it somewhere dark and around 70F. A pellicle will likely form.
11. After a week, taste it - does it tasty zippy and tangy and acidic? Congratulations! If it is not strong enough, let it ferment longer. It might be that your fermentation spot is too cold - see if you can move it somewhere warmer. If it tastes anything not like kombucha, get rid of it and start again.
12. Left alone, it will keep getting stronger and more acidic and you'll get kombucha vinegar. This is useful too, but not very pleasant to drink. Make sure to remove kombucha and drink it and add fresh tea!

Straight from the fermentation vessel

Off the continuous brew spigot, it's rowdy - sharp and full of acidic tang, twisting your tongue up. You can drink it like this but it's a bit of an acquired taste. For general consumption, consider diluting and flavoring it with:

• Lemonade
• Sweetened Tea, herbal or black
• Juice

Sugar balances the acid and more liquid lessens the intensity. You could even make a hot kombucha tea by making honey lemon tea and adding kombucha to it to taste. The kombucha's room temp (~70F) off the spigot so it shouldn't cool the tea down too much.

Bottle Finishing (F2, or second fermentation)

If you want a carbonated kombucha, consider bottling it and adding some more sugar for the yeast to consume, then popping it in the fridge. This will yield a fizzy, tasty, cold drink. For a 16 oz bottle, you want about a teaspoon of sugar in some form.² If you're adding a sweet fruit, add about 1/4 cup of puree / juice. If you're just adding lemon juice, add actual sugar. If you taste it before you bottle it, you want it to be slightly too sweet, because the yeast will continue to consume the sugar in bottle to produce carbonation.

1. Stir your primary fermentation vessel - yeast settles!
2. Fill a bottle halfway for kombucha.
3. For every 16 oz in bottle capacity, add 1/4 cup of juice or 1 tsp of sugar.
4. Give the bottle a swirl, mixing the kombucha in there with the juice and sugar
5. Fill it up the rest of the way, leaving an inch of headspace.
6. Let it ferment at room temp for 1-3 days and then chill completely before tasting. I'd wager 2 days.
7. If it's still too flat, let it ferment longer next time, or take it back out for another day.

Brew notes

2026-09-29: Very thin pellicle formed and it's trapping carbonation - ambient temp is approximately 70F (plus or minus 5 dependiing on time of day). It's moving a little faster than I expected, but Baba's Bucha is strong. When I cracked the bottle it looked like champagne.

2026-09-27: Used a bottle of Baba's Bucha to start two half gallon mason jugs of kombucha, half a bottle in each. This was just above the 9:1 ratio needed and tea / water / sugar ratios were as described above.

2026-09-26: Until September 2026, I always thought the SCOBY was the pellicle. I had asked for a SCOBY on facebook and was given pellicles and thought - this is the way I've always done it. Then I read³ that the pellicle is a byproduct and not necessary for fermentation, only the raw kombucha liquid is necessary, and it's considerably more important to get the right ratio of this to sweet tea than it is to have a pellicle. Some people suggest it helps with carbonation, but I do that in the bottle.

So what to do with the pellicle? Leave it, until it takes up too much room, then just get rid of it. It's not part of the process, it's a byproduct.