How-to Recipe: Kombucha Home Brewing & Flavouring by La Pachamama Organic

Learn and discover how to brew and flavour delicious vitamin rich Kombucha in the comfort of your home. As featured in the Earth Kiss Super Naturals Range. Harmonise inner and outer wellness and nurture your skin, body and soul below.

Find out how to make this delicious Kombucha recipe crafted by our friends Benjamin & Anne Marie from La Pachamama Organic.

KOMBUCHA – HOME BREWING & FLAVOURING

For this recipe you can buy a bottle of unflavoured Kombucha in the shop. But it is so much more satisfying to set up your own small Kombucha brewery! With little effort and no special equipment, you can brew your own Kombucha at home.

Kombucha is basically fermented tea with sugar, resulting in a refreshing, fizzy drink that is rich in natural probiotics, antioxidants, vitamins and micronutrients.

The secret to brewing your own Kombucha is in the SCOBY, an acronym for "symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast". It looks like something you might find in a forgotten jar in a natural history museum, but don’t be put off.

A Scoby is a miraculous matrix of good bacteria and healthy yeasts, that metabolise the tea and the sugar and transform it into the effervescent health tonic that is Kombucha.

How to get a Scoby in your life? You need a friend who already brews Kombucha to give you a baby Scoby. Or you scour the internet and find someone who offers a Scoby locally.

The thing is that Scobies grow over time, so you can expand your brewery, but at a certain point it is just easier to start giving them away to friends.

Kombucha is a delicious to drink just by itself, but you can do a second fermentation to flavour it, using flavour-makers such as vanilla, ginger, lemon, fruits, and herbs, etc.

Read on for instructions on how to make your own Booch, and two ways of flavouring!

Kombucha brewing

• 2 litre non-chlorinated water (67.63 fl oz)
• 6 heaped teaspoons of loose-leaf green tea
• 1/2 cup cane sugar
• kombucha mother-culture (known as SCOBY) in ½ to 1 cup fresh Kombucha tea from previous batch
• 3 litre clean glass container (101.45 fl oz)
• Clean cloth to cover the fermenting jar and an elastic rubber band or string to secure the cloth.
• Plastic strainer
• Funnel
• 3 flip-top bottles

Method

1. Bring the water to a boil in a pot. Turn the heat off once boiling.
2. Add the green tea and the sugar. Stir to dissolve.
3. Let the tea cool down.
4. Prepare your 3 litre glass jar by cleaning it and drying it.
5. Add the Scoby and ½ to 1 cup of the previous batch to the jar.
6. Using a strainer to catch the tea leaves, pour the tea into the jar on top of the Scoby.
7. Cover the jar with the clean cloth and secure with a rubber band or a piece of string.
8. Set the jar aside in a warm place (around 22°C) and wait for 5 – 10 days. The longer you let the Kombucha ferment, the more acidic it will become. It is ready when you like the taste!
9. Strain the Kombucha tea and bottle in clean flip-top bottles. Make sure not to fill your bottles completely to leave space for pressure from natural carbonation.
10. To make a new batch, make sure to keep ½ to 1 cup of cultured Kombucha and start again from step 1.

Second fermentation

As said before, this is where you can let your imagination run free. Experiment with flavours, fruits, herbs and superfoods you like. The following two are delicious!

Lemon ginger

Ingredients per bottle of plain Kombucha

• Juice of ½ lemon
• 2 cm fresh ginger, finely chopped (0.8 in)
• Optional: Lemon grass, chopped

Method

1. Juice the lemon, chop the ginger and the lemon grass
2. Add these ingredients to the bottle of plain Kombucha, making sure to leave some headspace for pressure from natural carbonation.
3. Set the bottle aside in a warm place (around 22°C) and wait for 3 – 6 days.
4. Taste. If you like it, it’s ready. Pour through a strainer into a funnel into a clean bottle to store.

Raspberry beetroot

Ingredients per bottle of plain Kombucha

• ½ small fresh beetroot
• 10 raspberries

Method

1. Wash the beetroot. Don't peel it. Cut it in half, and slice finely.
2. Add the beetroot slices, together with the 10 raspberries to the bottle of plain Kombucha, making sure to leave some headspace for pressure from natural carbonation.
3. Set the bottle aside in a warm place (around 22°C) and wait for 3 – 6 days.
4. Taste. If you like it, it’s ready. Pour through a strainer into a funnel into a clean bottle to store.

Want to know more about La Pachamama? Based within the Spanish hillside of Andalucía, both Benjamin and Anne Marie are passionate about growing and creating 100% organic plant-based whole food recipes which work in harmony with Mother Nature. Shortly after Anne-Marie’s first trip to Peru and Bolivia in 2008, Pachamama Catering was born. The name originates in honour of ‘Pachamama’ the goddess referred to by the indigenous people of the Andes – She is an “Earth Mother” type goddess that gives us life, feeds us and presents natural abundance upon us.

For more delicious vegan recipes from La Pachamama, discover their cook book here https://www.pachamamaorganic.eu/buy-the-cookbook/