Fiber Fool

I grew a kombucha scoby from a bottle of raw kombucha at the end of 2012. Since then I’ve made several batches. How many I don’t recall. But I had used 4 different types of teas at various points. Three different black teas and a green tea. One day I caught myself telling DH that I wished I could do a fair taste comparison to understand the nuances of the tea choices.

In order to compare apples to apples I needed to brew the batches at the same time for the same length of time in the same environment so they would all be the same age. Eventually I had plenty of scobys at my disposal to do that. Over the past 2 weeks, roughly, I brewed concurrently each of the four different teas - Keemun, Assam, Darjeeling, and Lucky Dragon Hyson. Since I had another scoby left I decided to try coffee kombucha as well which I won’t get into in this post.

I bottled them on Sunday morning when they were at 13 days of fermentation at roughly 67-69 degrees F. I poured off small tasters of each one for DH and I to try right then, without bottle conditioning or chilling. Overall they all came across as pretty sweet. In fact, it might not have been bad to have left them another few days. Although since I like bottle conditioning for 3-5 days to produce good carbonation I tend to bottle a tad on the sweeter side as fermentation continues in the bottle. We’ll see what the next tasting in a few days yields.

Now, since this was the first batch with all four types going at once they were all inoculated with darjeeling kombucha so they aren’t quite 100% their tea. The next batch will be closer to 100%. But I have some preliminary results.

From our favorite to our least favorite (though none were bad or undrinkable):
Assam - This was the most well rounded of the four types I brewed. It was smooth and the tanic astringency of the tea was full-mouthed, rather than concentrated on the tip of the tongue. There was a very slight undertone of smokiness.
Keemun - Like the Assam, this one was fairly well rounded and had a full-mouth astringency. The smokiness of it was very pronounced. This was the first batch of Keemun from this particular tea order and I noticed a strong smoky smell that I hadn’t with our previous order of the tea. I’m not sure if it was a mix and we didn’t get the tea the bag indicates or what as I don’t expect a Keemun to have that strong of a smoky note nor is is considered a good idea to brew with a smoked tea. I’m doing one more batch with it, but that will likely be the last I use this particular order of Keemun for kombucha.
Darjeeling - This kombucha was relatively sweet. At first taste it was very mild, though the astringency builds in the aftertaste, but is concentrated on the tip of the tongue. It was almost drying to the tip of our tongues.
Lucky Dragon Hyson - This too was well rounded and quite smooth. It was also very mild and had an almost syrupy aftertaste. It was our least favorite of the four at this stage.

On a related, but side note I just calculated my costs for a 1/2 gallon batch of kombucha. It comes out to only $0.15 - $0.25 per 8 ounces! Generally you buy 12-16 ounce bottles for $4 and upwards! That’s a savings of 85-92% depending upon what tea I use and what, if any flavoring agents I use in the bottle conditioning. It doesn’t take long to make back the cost of the flip-top grolsch-style bottles or the wide mouth canning jars I brew in with savings like that. I knew it was much more economical (and environmental) but I hadn’t realized it was that drastically so!

Have you brewed kombucha? What are your favorite teas to use?