On Tue, 2 Feb 2021 14:58:44 Nick Maclaren wrote:

In article ,
Chris Hogg wrote:

+2. The various links to Kombucha that come up on Google show a quite
well-defined disc of jelly-like stuff. The ginger beer plants I knew
were never like that - more of a soft amorphous blob that sat in the
bottom of the jar.

The way that ALL of those mechanisms work, whether sourdough, lambic
beers, kombucha or ginger beer plant, is by starting off a fermentation
with some convenient yeast, and then letting it evolve naturally. The
result will be a mixture of fungi and bacteria that is dependent on
both the location and how you maintain it (e.g. the acidity, type of
food, and level of aeration).

A couple of years ago I had a surfeit of cider apples and so I decided
to try to make cider vinegar. I used a bit of a ham-fisted approach and
added some vinegar from a commercial cider vinegar. I say ham-fisted
because I had no idea whether the commercial stuff had a live culture in
it or not but, anyway, I left it in an open jar covered with muslin
(vinegar culture needs aerobic conditions, rather then anaerobic as with
cider, wine, etc.) for about three or four months and, indeed, it
produced vinegar and, sitting on the top was this jelly-like substance
which is known as the mother.

This last year I became interested in making kombucha and, since the
making of vinegar and kombucha uses a similar process, I decided to add
my vinegar mother to the tea infusion - and it worked.

I've done a lot of reading around about making kombucha and one thing
they all emphasise is that one *cannot* use a vinegar mother to make
kombucha successfully, but one must use a SCOBY - which is a similar
sort of thing - but they don't exactly tell you why. Presumably there is
a taint which make it taste vinegary, but mine didn't. I've also read
that, if you leave a SCOBY kombucha fermenting for too long, that will
taste vinegary.

The only thing that my experimental kombucha could be criticised for was
that it became extremely cloudy, especially when I bottled it and put it
in the fridge! But then, so did my vinegar! Even filtering it made no
difference.

One of my daughters gave me a dried SCOBY for Christmas. I haven't yet
tried to resuscitate it. I must do so as I do like the taste of
kombucha. And the advantage of kombucha-making over vinegar-making is
that vinegar takes many months whereas kombucha takes only about a week.

David

--
David Rance writing from Caversham, Reading, UK