Ready to start experimenting... Starters other than sweet tea?

[raketemensch]

I made a batch with maple syrup instead one time, and it was delicious. The recipe came from the Noma fermentation book. I can't do it all the time though, as it's quite expensive.

I also wanted to keep the scoby healthy over the long term, to build a continuous system, and apparently using things like maple syrup (or things without tannins?) can really shorten the life of a scoby.

Now, though, I have that continuous system cranking out 2 gallons of booch every week and a half or so, and I end up with a nice, healthy scoby in my "drinking jug" that I toss at the end of each cycle, so I figure that it's time to start experimenting more.

I do a lot of other fermenting, so I'm wondering if I can just feed it pretty much any sort of sugar? Is there just a safe starting gravity for it?

 

[RudeBooch]

I made a cold brew kombucha. Using the cold brew as the starter. Made it like as you would make regular booch. But you have to make the initial cold brew first. Then I get 2 cups of the cold brew and 2 cups sugar and heat that up. You want to give the scoby something to chew on. Cool down and dump it back in the vessel with the rest of the batch. Use a scoby and do not use the tea starter or add any acv to bring the ph down. The purpose is that you dont want to end up with a sour batch. Then let it do its thing for 7-10 days.

I always premature it to 7 days cos i do a second ferment for alcohol.

 

[raketemensch]

I made a cold brew kombucha. Using the cold brew as the starter. Made it like as you would make regular booch. But you have to make the initial cold brew first. Then I get 2 cups of the cold brew and 2 cups sugar and heat that up. You want to give the scoby something to chew on. Cool down and dump it back in the vessel with the rest of the batch. Use a scoby and do not use the tea starter or add any acv to bring the ph down. The purpose is that you dont want to end up with a sour batch. Then let it do its thing for 7-10 days.

I always premature it to 7 days cos i do a second ferment for alcohol.

What kind of yeast are you pitching for 2f?

What I ended up doing was taking my "spare scoby" and pitching it into an old Mr. Beer fermenter with a gallon of apple cider.

It developed a new pellicle very quickly and seems quite happy. It's almost too sour already, I'm going to do another batch and refrigerate it a little earlier, or maybe even pitch some yeast into it.

 

[RudeBooch]

What kind of yeast are you pitching for 2f?

What I ended up doing was taking my "spare scoby" and pitching it into an old Mr. Beer fermenter with a gallon of apple cider.

It developed a new pellicle very quickly and seems quite happy. It's almost too sour already, I'm going to do another batch and refrigerate it a little earlier, or maybe even pitch some yeast into it.

I would have never thought about fermenting only the acv with the scoby.

Im currently using safale us-05. Thinking about switching to white labs cali dry ale yeast.

 

[raketemensch]

The scoby itself (not the pellicle) is packed with its own yeast, so now I'm going to start doing experiments to see what other kidns of sugars it's happy with.

I made a banana wine a few years back that I'm going to try, since this cider experiment went so well.