Kombucha Fermentation – How Do You Store SCOBY for Kombucha?

If you want your Kombucha be strong, consistent, and to taste like a commercial one, then you need to use the same SCOBY contained in a commercial kombucha. Remember, making Kombucha, just like brewing wine, mead, or beer, is nothing more than glorified yeast herding. You give the SCOBY what it wants to eat, and it does the rest. It's really that simple. You just need the same starter as a commercial company.

Now, many companies spend years perfecting their strains of yeast/bacteria, and trying to raise your own or getting a starter from "some guy" often just won't compare because it is either weak, or it hasn't been fed properly, it contains too much acetalbacter, etc.

So, how do you do it? You use the SCOBY that commercial kombucha makers provide you in the bottle and propagate it. In homebrewing we use a similar procedure called "washing yeast," where you take a commercial beer, drink the majority, and then use the dregs of yeast at the bottom to ferment your own beer.

Start with an unpasteurized, raw commercial bottle of Kombucha that you like that has not been sorbated or sulfited. Check the bottle for wisps of sediment in the bottle, indicating that it contains some mother, the more the better.

Then, you prepare food (black tea and sugar), and mix the two. Cover with some cloth, store in a warm (I would guess at 65-70 degrees F based on my experience brewing wine/beer and alsoo purposely making vinegar) and dark place, and let the mother start to grow. It'll take 2-3 feedings before you have a strong mother, but it should form. If it doesn't? Grab another bottle of kombucha and try again.

This link explains the process in better detail.

http://grist.org/food/mother-load-the-secret-to-diy-kombucha/

Once you have the mother, just continue feeding and do whatever you can not to break the cycle of feedings so it doesn't get stressed. You are dealing with living things, and so they will have a tendency to fall into cycles. If you break the cycles, they'll get stressed.

Unless you've got the time and resources to set up your own biology lab, you're not likely to have much luck raising your own bacterial cultures from scratch. You'd probably need growth mediums suited to particular strains of bacteria and strict isolation between them to prevent other opportunistic bugs from taking over. If you really, really want to try, you might have better luck asking on another SE site.

Fortunately, a lot of pickled-vegetable recipes (such as this recipe for dill pickles, or this kimchi recipe) don't bother with an initial culture. This is what's called a "wild fermentation", meaning that you're culturing with whatever bacteria happen to float their way into your fermentation vessel. If the initial culture is present, it's there to kick-start the process, or to obtain a very specific flavor profile by using a precise blend of bacterial strains. In those cases, you'll want to buy, because it's practically impossible to invite only a single strain of bacteria to the party. Even if your kitchen is scrupulously clean, exposing your food to open air also quickly exposes it to bacterial colonists that you can't control.

Other fermented foods can be started from a purchased culture, or they can be inoculated from a sample of active culture in a purchased food. For example, you can use store-bought yogurt with live cultures as a starter for fermenting your own, and you can cultivate the scoby from a store-bought bottle of kombucha to make your own at home. With some care and maintenance, you can make some of these cultures last for years. The cultures that give sourdough bread its distinctive flavor are sometimes kept this way.

If you need a specific starter for your recipe, you'll just have to pony up and purchase it. Depending on the final product, you might be able to use a different starter and wind up with a similar end product (see here) but it would be inadvisable and possibly unsafe to deviate from your directions.