City Folks and Kombucha

A blog visitor recently got here by googling "how can I make my kombucha fizzier?" It was really interesting to go back and look at some of the other hits that came up for that question. One in particular was full of all sorts of science information for balancing the yeast and bacteria in the scoby. On the one hand, helpful. But on the other hand, pretty intimidating and complicated if you're a bear of little brain. The site overwhelmed me, and I've been making kombucha for more than three years. Nevertheless, lots of trouble-shooting advice on that site.

A few days later, I was talking to Katie and she said her kombucha just got ickier and ickier as she made a few batches. She ended up throwing out two batches, and finally gave up. Well, guess what? That website had told me the answer. The chlorinated water that is available in city water-pipes has [duh!] chlorine in it. And why does it have chlorine? To kill bacteria! And what is a kombucha mushroom? A scoby: a symbiotic colony of BACTERIA and yeast. So using chlorinated water will slowly kill your bacteria and leave you with way too many yeastie-beasties in your scoby.... which will become a scoy (leaving out the B) and you'll end up with something that is NOT kombucha.

The solution would be to buy distilled water, or use a good water filter. They also say that letting water sit out on the counter in an open container for 24 hours will allow the chlorine to dissipate into the air. Out here in the country, with real water coming out of a real well, and with a nice reverse-osmosis system, I've got water that makes happy kombucha. But if we ever have to shock the well again, I'd better plan on buying water for kombucha for a few months.

(Side note on Site-meter. I've been amazed at the number of visitors who've come recently, looking for information on how to use a juicer to make grape jelly/jam. It's been anywhere from 4-8% of my daily hits for the last few weeks. It's kinda fun to think that writing about your experiment -- and how well it turned out -- can assure other people that it's safe to try the same thing.)