How to Ferment Kombucha Tea

Video Transcript

"Fruit flies love kombucha. It also makes it a great fruit fly trap but what you do is you put it in a place where fruit flies wouldn't have access to it so maybe with some light cloth over it just to kind of tent so that the air can get through to dry it so that the fruit flies won't have access. And it is important that when your fermenting it that it is covered with a cloth. However you don't want to use cheesecloth because the weave is to loose and the fruit flies would get in there and lay eggs. So I use old tee shirts or old sheets cut up and use a rubber band to secure it on top of the jar. How long do you have to let it ferment for? About that is a good question it is it really varies and the reason it varies is first of all the temperature and second of all in taste. So a temperature the fermentation ideally refers to 77 degrees and if you wanted to you can control that by getting a aquarium heater and setting it to the temperature and putting that underneath and using a heating pad . I'm a little more natural and I just go with the flow in the season, in the winter your going to want to ferment it longer I usually do it for about 3 weeks. In the summer it is shorter 1 1/2 to 2 weeks 10 days is 2 weeks. The second factor being taste so if your not sure if your kombucha is ready or not you can take a straw open up your little kombucha, stick it and sip it and see if is the flavor that you like. The shorter the brewing time the sweeter the mixture, the longer the brewing time it would eventually turn in to vinegar which doesn't taste very good but you can dilute ti with juice or use it as a starter for other batches, or you can use all the ways that you can use vinegar as terms as household cleaning products, splash it on as a deodorant. Anyway that you might use vinegar I don't know anyone who put kombucha on its deodorant but it is a possibility all things are possible. But it does has a lot of uses so it is very versatile. "