Kombucha/Beer Blending - Anyone tried it?

Vanberg and DeWulf produces a commercial blend of kombucha and lambic called Lambrucha (http://beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/22399/56855). I was able to taste it last weekend in Philly and I was impressed. It's pretty much like a session champagne.

Has anyone has ever tried making a batch of kombucha and blending it with homebrew? I'm definitely gonna try it soon, but I'm not sure yet what style of beer to use or any quirks I should look out for. Any thoughts?

I would expect that a bitter ale like an IPA would not be a good one to try it with as when making sours you don't want to start with a highly hopped bitter beer since they don't mix well. That is from what I have heard though, only been dreaming I could have time to experiment with sours anyway.

Are the yeasts and bacteria found in scoby's and sours not very similar? I would expect the same idea applies to sours and kombucha since you can do either usually by letting the fermentible sugar(wort/sugar tea) sit out long enough to get some wee beasties to inhabit.

Just my .02.....good luck when you try and let me know how it turns out!

A friend of mine and I were just discussing this very thing! I have successfully made Kombucha and am now looking to do a secondary fermentation with a beer. Let me know how your goes and I will do the same!

I've done a little more searching and came across a couple posts from the mad fermentationist. This guy is awesome.
http://www.themadfermentationist.com/search/label/Kombucha

There's also this thread which discusses pretty much exactly what I'm going for (shame on me for not searching for this before I started this thread... my bad).
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f167/brewing-kombucha-add-beer-263554/

I'm gonna start the blending experiment tomorrow. I've also been looking into doing a smash beer for a while too so I figured this would be a good chance to kill two birds with one stone. Here's the recipe:
12 lb dark munich
.75 oz Glacier hops (6% AA) (60 min)
.25 oz Glacier hops (flameout)
OG should be around 1.060ish. At the end I'm gonna peel off 1 gallon and pitch a scoby and let it ferment in an open container. The other 4 gallons I'll rack onto an existing safale-05 cake. After 2 weeks I'll pasteurize the kombucha and add it to the beer and leave it in secondary for another week or so. The reason I'm pasteurizing is to prevent it from getting too dry and also to avoid bottle bombs. I'm hoping to end up with something flemishy

BennyDarko said:

After 2 weeks I'll pasteurize the kombucha and add it to the beer and leave it in secondary for another week or so. The reason I'm pasteurizing is to prevent it from getting too dry and also to avoid bottle bombs. I'm hoping to end up with something flemishy

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Forgive me for ignorance, but I've never understood this. Doesn't pasteurization completely destroy any possible benefits of kombucha? Probiotics, etc? I just don't see the point of growing these wonderful live cultures and then killing them before consuming. Unless it's solely for the benefit of any taste effects it might have on the beer...?

And yes, I know they sell pasteurized kombucha in stores. Again, why?

Pasteurizing doesn't kill all of the microbes, just a lot of them. It lowers the bacterial count, increasing shelf life. It also destroys potential pathogens. You still maintain populaitions of microbes. This is why pasteurized milk still eventually spoils.

Once my first batch is done, I was going to experiment with blending (w/ beer, juices, etc).

I'm planning on doing post-fermentation blending, like a black and tan.
I'm thinking wheat beers would be a good bet, and blonde ales. Maybe cream ale as well. Basically light, low hop profile beers, especially ones that do well with fruit (because of how tart it can get) or sour yeast strains.

Beyond beer, I've watched some videos of people blending (in cup) with all manner of fruit juices.

I'm just going to do test mixes in a 4 oz "taster glass" to see what proportions of what beers and juices work best. That way I don't waste a whole beer at a time.

ChessRockwell said:

Forgive me for ignorance, but I've never understood this. Doesn't pasteurization completely destroy any possible benefits of kombucha? Probiotics, etc? I just don't see the point of growing these wonderful live cultures and then killing them before consuming. Unless it's solely for the benefit of any taste effects it might have on the beer...?

And yes, I know they sell pasteurized kombucha in stores. Again, why?

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There are many other benefits to fermented foods/beverages besides the probiotic effects. Many fermented foods are cooked following fermentation (sourdough being the main one that comes to mind) and are still quite healthful. In the case of kombucha there is a wide variety of organic acids produced during fermentation that can be very beneficial healthwise; namely glucaric acid, butyric acid, malic acid etc... and let's not forget about all those b-vitamins that are little friends synthesized for us before I decided to boil them away.

In this case however, I'm doing it entirely for flavor. I generally don't brew/drink beer with health in mind and this batch is no exception. I've got my normal pipeline of kombucha/kraut/kefir still going and that should continue to satisfy my probiotic needs.

It's been two weeks since brew day so I went ahead with the pasteurization/blending stuff. The kombucha side tasted really great, but was still kinda sweet. I measured the gravity and it was still at 1.041 (OG was 1.051)... I don't normally measure the gravity of my kombucha batches so I don't know if that's normal, but I figured two weeks at about 75 degrees should have fermented away more than 10 points of gravity. The pH was a little less than 4 (started around 5) and it had a healthy lookin scoby growing on top so I know that the malt provided enough yeast nutrient to ferment normally.
I ended up heating it to around 150 degrees for 10-15 minutes and then pouring it into the fermenter with the other 4 gallons of sac-fermented beer. I figure I'll probably get a little more activity now since I just added a gallon of 1.041 wort so I'm gonna leave it for another week and think about bottling then.

BennyDarko said:

In this case however, I'm doing it entirely for flavor. I generally don't brew/drink beer with health in mind and this batch is no exception. I've got my normal pipeline of kombucha/kraut/kefir still going and that should continue to satisfy my probiotic needs.

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That's cool, sounds like an interesting experiment anyway. So I'm not sure I understand correctly, you're going to pitch just a scoby to the 1 gallon to ferment it? Are you using any starter tea to keep it acidic enough?

I had a keg of my hoppy kombucha and an American pale ale on tap at the same time. Those two were GREAT blended together—I'd like to try blending a bit of the kombucha in right at the end of the boil to pasteurize it, but I wonder if the cold and O2 starved environment of the keg might be enough to prevent any unwanted refermentation.

ChessRockwell said:

That's cool, sounds like an interesting experiment anyway. So I'm not sure I understand correctly, you're going to pitch just a scoby to the 1 gallon to ferment it? Are you using any starter tea to keep it acidic enough?

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That's right, I just pitched a scoby in 1 gallon and fermented for 2 weeks. I added vinegar to acidify until the pH was around 5, but it didn't take very much.

zing said:

I had a keg of my hoppy kombucha and an American pale ale on tap at the same time. Those two were GREAT blended together—I'd like to try blending a bit of the kombucha in right at the end of the boil to pasteurize it, but I wonder if the cold and O2 starved environment of the keg might be enough to prevent any unwanted refermentation.

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As long as you're kegging it's totally worth a try since you can just bleed off pressure as needed if you did have any fermentation happening. It'd be kinda fun to watch as the flavor change over time.

Unfortunately I'm still on bottles so I'm stuck with pasteurization for now.

Well, the real fun experiment would be taking some of that once it's carbed and putting it into CO2 purged bottles to see if anything forms.

I just tried my first home brewed kombucha beer blend. I added 80mls of one week old, fully fermented KBC, per 500ml bottle of rye saison (7.4%abv), WITHOUT pasteurizing it. After about 3 weeks in the bottle, the taste is incredible, genuinely like a lambic. Lots of complexity, but not much sourness. It doesn't taste at all like kombucha to be honest. Nor does it taste like the rest of the saison which wasn't dosed. I wondered if the bugs from the KBC munched up some of the alcohol, as it doesn't seem as strong. Btw, there was no scoby in the bottle. I'd definitely repeat this experiment, as I'm very pleased with the results. However, I would definitely reduce my priming sugar, as the unpasteurized KBC seems to have added seriously intense carbonation.

What results in taste have you people had from your experiments?

Just out of curiosity I tried sticking a shot of Bourbon into a glass of kombucha. The resulting cocktail was a very mild, mellow, bland, boring drink. Not offensive or unpleasant, but the alcohol in the Bourbon seemed to neutralise the acid and vice versa. A waste of two good things, unless perhaps you were trying to get some floosy drunk, but unless she was pretty stupid she'd be very sus about what you were feeding her.

My cocktail was dull, but I'd love to try your kombucha-home brewed beer mix. I'll try making my own and see how it goes.

Happy brewing and experimenting

So, today I tasted a sample from the carboy and decided it wasn't sour enough. I decided to take a separate batch of kombucha and add it a little at a time until I was satisfied with the taste. Upon reflection, I think I got a little carried away with it, because it ended up being a little over the top. My keg just became open the other day and I didn't feel like pasteurizing all of it like I had previously planned to do, so I ended up just racking into a corny.

The tastes I've had today have been pretty good, but the other people I've offered samples to have hated it (not too unlike kombucha in general). My roommate told me it tasted exactly like beer blended with tomato juice... It's definitely funky, but not like any other sour beer funk I've ever had.

I'm gonna reserve my judgement for now. Once it gets carbonated then I'll have a much better idea of whether this experiment is worth redoing/refining. I'll try to make up some more formal tasting notes and post those. I'm also very curious to see how it changes over time in the keg. As always I'll try and keep yall updated.

Fleur from Goose Island use it.