Are you in love with kombucha, but not so in love with the hole it can burn in your wallet? You are in the right place! This article will teach you how to make your own kombucha at home. Brewing your own kombucha is surprisingly easy, and this guide will walk you through each step.
If you do not have any ingredients or equipment for brewing your own kombucha, you might want to check out our kombucha brewing kits to ensure you have everything you need! If you just need a SCOBY and starter tea, we can help you with that too!
Please note this recipe is intended for brewing with a 1-gallon glass jar. It is perfectly fine to start with a smaller amount—you will just want to scale the recipe to the size of your brew.
Here's how you can use a straw or spoon to gently push the new SCOBY aside and extract kombucha:
Don’t have flip-top bottles yet? No problem. We recommend getting them for your next batch, but these alternative options can work in a pinch.
Becoming a Kombucha Master
As with anything else, brewing your own kombucha is a learning process. As you brew more and more, you will learn what you can expect in terms of fermentation speed at different times of the year, your flavor preferences, and more. You might even decide that you love a tart kombucha and you don’t want to check on it until day 14—to each their own!
Thanks for learning with us today! We wish you the best of luck with your first brew, and many years of making your own kombucha to come. Have any questions or comments? We would love to hear them and help with any questions you might have—simply share in the comments below.
9 comments
Thanks for this ! Your recipe is great and I’ve been successfully making delicious raspberry~ginger kombucha for 2 years now. Just hit a snag today….I was taking a break, and had my scobys happily in their hotel, but just noticed some fruit flies have somehow found a gap in the cheese cloth and are inside the jar!😫😱 Can I possibly pull off the topmost scobys and save my starter? Or do I have to pitch everything and start from scratch?
Thanks.
Hi there,
Congrats on your first brew!
It sounds like the “silt” could be yeast particles from your brew, though it is difficult to say without seeing the brew.
I would recommend comparing to some of the yeast pictures in this article on Kombucha SCOBY health
Mold requires oxygen to grow & can thus only grow on the surface of your brew. Fortunately, this makes it a little easier to identify.
I hope this helps! Happy Brewing! :)
Hello. Brewing for the first time. I’m in the Ecuadorian Amazon, so using available resources in my area, which makes for a somewhat unconventional kombucha. Instead black Indian tea, I’m using guayusa, which has a similar phenolic composition. And my cane sugar is local raw panela, which is more or less unrefined pure cane sugar. To minimize impurities introduced by either the sugar or guayusa, I’m boiling both in the water a few minutes, not just pouring hot water over them to steep.
My first batch tastes good, and produced a good looking clean baby scoby on top, but there is some dark “silt” at the bottom with the mother. May be some mold, I’m not sure, since it’s my first time. Should I try rinsing that stuff off with clean pure water before starting a next batch?
Hi there,
A new SCOBY grows with each homebrew— the culture is constantly growing and changing when brewing consistently. While we are not aware of any science behind this claim to begin with, home-brewed kombucha is often grown at varying temperatures and offers the brewer control over other variables such as yeast/bacteria balance and temperature, which may affect the culture.
I read that drinking the same kombucha brew repeatedly can have adverse effects over time, and a way to circumvent that is to drink different brands of Kombucha. If making at home how do you change your brew so that it does not have the same bacteria repeatedly? Thanks I’m advance
Of course! I hope this all helps!
Seeing as you have run into issues a few times already, it may pay off to invest in a smaller jar that a coffee filter would work for. It is possible the towel could be housing mold spores.
Without a dishwasher, it sounds like you are taking the right steps. I would recommend soaking the jar with soap and very hot water, then scrubbing and rinsing the jar out with hot water, and finally rinsing it out with distilled white vinegar to make sure there is no residual soap. I would not recommend using sanitizing products.
If pH is above 4.5 at the start of your brew, add 1 tsp distilled white vinegar at a time until reading is 4.5 or below.
As far as the house, this is a new situation for us :). This could make brewing kombucha more difficult, but if movement is minimal I would not expect it to make it impossible. There are likely more mold spores around since it is a moist environment—making sure you start the brew at 4.5 or below is very important.
Best of luck! We hope you are able to master the elements at play here!
Thank you for the advice!
A couple more things:
The jar I was using is too wide for a coffee filter to cover the top. Is there a better alternative than a towel and rubber band or should I get a smaller jar? I was using a linen towel because it’s breathable and thin but still has a tight weave to keep bugs ‘n’ stuff out.
I don’t have a dishwasher, but sanitized all my dishes with hot water and a vinegar rinse. This time I ordered some IO Star iodine sanitizer, do you think that’s the right move?
If the starting pH is above 4.5, should I add an unfiltered unflavored kombucha like GT’s original to lower the pH? Or vinegar? I have read so many articles 😭
Lastly, I live in a house that floats on a river, so when boats go by the whole house does rock a little bit. Very gently but still noticeable. Do you think that’s enough disruption to be causing the mold issue? Should I just not brew kombucha in this house?
Thanks again,
Hannah
Hi there!
It looks like you just ordered with us for the first time— that’s a step in the right direction! :)
Please make sure you follow the instructions on our website (your SCOBY will arrive with a link to them). Instead of a towel covering the top of the jar, use a single coffee filter secured with a rubber band. This allows airflow while still fully protecting your brew.
If you have not, I would recommend putting your jar in the dishwasher on a high-heat/sanitize cycle to ensure any old mold spores are eliminated. If you are not already using black tea, I would recommend that (our instructions will cover quantities).
Since you ordered the pH strips, you will want to have a pH of 4.5 or below when starting your brew and 3.5 or below once your brew is completed. I would recommend placing your brew in a completely dark space with airflow (such as a cabinet or closet with the door cracked open). Try not to move or disturb your fermenting jar at all for at least the first 7 days (movement can disturb forming baby SCOBY particles and removing the cover can allow contaminants to enter the brew).
If you were following all of these instructions, the case may be that you were not using a quality SCOBY during your previous attempts. Feel free to reach out should you run into any additional questions! :)
Hi! I’ve tried three times now to brew kombucha at home, and every time it has molded. I don’t understand what I’m doing wrong! I have a large glass jar with a towel covering the top, which I wash and sanitize with distilled white vinegar each time, I brew my tea and add the sugar and SCOBY and starter tea (they come in 8oz packages so I never do more than a gallon even though my jar is much larger in the hopes of someday making bigger batches). I follow the instructions I find on different websites for sugar and tea ratios, keep it near my kitchen where it is warm and away from windows, and as soon as the baby SCOBY starts to form I get mold! I don’t understand :( please help