Babies, and continuous brewing.

[Guest guest]

Hi All,

I've been brewing again for several months now and though I do have a scoby

hotel with back-ups, about a month ago, I began simply leaving my grandmothers,

mothers, and babies in my big glass brew container, keeping them in the active

brewing process. They look like a stack of pancakes, and they're making lovely,

fizzy kombucha that I bottle once a week.

When I bottle, I push the SCOBY down gently with a ladle to scoop up and pour

the tea into filter, funnel, and bottles. There are enough bubbles under this

mass of mushrooms to float it high and almost dry on the tea, so that the top of

the SCOBY is a firm, shiny, mounded form, rather than a diaphanous floppy baby.

I don't remove this, but simply keep bailing out the tea until there's just

enough tea left beneath the colony for starter, and then gently pour my new

sweet tea mix over the whole thing and gently nudge the 'stack' up and down

enough to make sure the liquids are mixed well.

So far, this method has been working well and is so much easier. Is this

completely crazy? Are there problems down the road from doing this? If I simply

put all of this in a continuous brew container, would this system work the same

way?

Before I began this new approach, I periodically removed everything from the

brew vessel and cleaned it out before resuming, to remove the pale yeast

sediment on the bottom. I'm not noticing much of that yet and the balance of the

tea tastes good.

When a SCOBY gets really firm on top, but doesn't look dried-out or 'unhealthy',

is it a mother or a baby, or just the top of a living stack?

I'd really appreciate some guidance here if I'm way off track.

I also just dug out a large, plastic, spigoted container we'd used in our RV for

holding distilled water that would make a strong, light, continuous brew

container, so I'm eager to try doing that but I'm uncertain how that's done.

Thanks for any advice,

Be well,

Léna Guyot