Splitting and growing additional scobies

I noticed my scoby is starting to get too large in diameter for my gallon fermenting jar. Is it ok for me to basically just cut it in half?

My other question is, how is it that when I got my starter scoby that it produced another bigger scoby atop of it while the resulting scoby never produced children of its own?

scobysurfer said:

I noticed my scoby is starting to get too large in diameter for my gallon fermenting jar. Is it ok for me to basically just cut it in half?

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Yes you can cut a scoby. However, the scoby will not outgrow the container.
You want the scoby to seal to the sides, this keeps your carbonation in, and foreign substances out. When the scoby does not cover the entire surface of the liquid, it would be like your skin not covering the entire surface of your body. That would be bad, right?

scobysurfer said:

My other question is, how is it that when I got my starter scoby that it produced another bigger scoby atop of it while the resulting scoby never produced children of its own?

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The first ferment was balanced and produced a baby.
The second ferment was probably not balanced as well.
Sometimes you can have a good brew and not produce a baby, it does happen. This should not be a common occurrence though.
Additionally, I have 3 jars that do not produce babies because of how I harvested the previous batch; the scobies stayed floating and continued to build instead of starting over with a new baby.

kyt said:

The first ferment was balanced and produced a baby.
The second ferment was probably not balanced as well.
Sometimes you can have a good brew and not produce a baby, it does happen. This should not be a common occurrence though.
Additionally, I have 3 jars that do not produce babies because of how I harvested the previous batch; the scobies stayed floating and continued to build instead of starting over with a new baby.

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Very interesting to learn. My first scoby was from Brooklyn Kombucha, it was about half the diameter of the container and it produced a baby which eventually outgrew its mother! I ended up giving the mother to a friend and have kept the baby which is now 5 batches big!

Yes, so now my scoby just grows as opposed to producing a baby. What exactly do you mean by balanced?

scobysurfer said:

Yes, so now my scoby just grows as opposed to producing a baby. What exactly do you mean by balanced?

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Kombucha is an amalgamation of yeast and bacteria. It's kind of like brewing beer and vinegar at the same time (but not exactly).
There needs to be a balance between them.

Here's a page with a long list of symptoms/conditions and how to alter the balance of the brew.

http://users.bestweb.net/~om/kombucha_balance/

There's a lot of useful tips on there; some things I don't completely agree with.

“Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.”
― Bruce Lee

A scoby once submerged does not continue to grow. A new scoby will only develop on the surface. Break the surface tension and the layer likely sinks, sometimes it does not, but if it does it typically ends up adhering to the mother. People think the mother has grown but it has not, it just has baby layers sinking and attaching. Same thing happens when the mother stays floating, a new baby forms on surface and just adheres to the mother below it. Every layer you can pull away in a scoby was at one time a separate scoby. There are instances when your mother makes great kombucha but a new scoby fails to develop, no film, nothing--this is caused by a missing organism.

I can start a one gallon batch, a 7" wide jug, by using just a 3" diameter 1/8-1/4" thick scoby. A new scoby forms and my booch is well balanced. I have found no correlation between the size of scoby and ferment time & taste of my finished product.

This is the result when I pulled 2 "layers" from my 5-batch scoby apart:



Do you think I should throw these scoby pieces back on top of the one intact scoby that remained, or should I just toss them out? The pieces are noticeably a little whiter and harder to the touch than the intact scoby.

Needless to say, it was a bad idea. I'd like to know if anybody else has had any success in extracting additional scobys from an existing one? And if so, how did you do it?

kyt - you mention "cutting" the scoby, yet in the same post stress that the scoby should seal the container. Is that really a viable option?

The SCOBY is not a necessary component for fermentation. It isn't even necessary to start a batch. If you threw away all of your SCOBYs you should grow a replacement one. The new "baby" will seal the surface. Like Sara says, if you break the surface that new baby may fall, but you should still grow another one to replace that one. Its like a skin the bacteria form as a protective barrier.
Having sufficient starter solution, with plenty of viable microbial cells, is far more important than the SCOBY.