Guest guest Posted April 7, 2008 Report Share Posted April 7, 2008 On Sat, Apr 5, 2008 at 3:41 PM, <nutrition > wrote: > Hello, > > I think I destroyed my SCOBY. > > I wrote in a few months ago saying my Kombucha now tastes like sour > vinegar > rather than fizzy Kombucha. I followed instructions to add vodka to > freshly > brewed Kombucha to get rid of the bacteria that is causing the vinegar > flavor. > *This is a new one on me. Did you do anything that would have caused your Kombucha to become a mother of vinegar such as adding unpasterized vinegar to the ferment? If not, likely your ferment was simply out of balance.* > > > > Now my old SCOBY sunk to the bottom and will not form a new SCOBY. *Where your scoby sits in the ferment has little or nothing to do with its ability to make Kombucha. If it is slow forming a new scoby it is likely that adding the vodka to your ferment killed off a large number of the bacteria necessary to form a scoby. The scoby is the " house " that the bacteria build to live in.* *Usually if a ferment gets too sour too quickly it is because your ferment has become unbalanced toward the yeast side of things. Ways to adjust the ferment are to only take your starter fluid from the very top of the ferment before removing the the scoby, adding less sugar to your sweet tea mix but in my opinion never use less than one cup of sugar per gallon of tea, or brew at lower temperatures as higher temperatures favor the yeast content of the brew. Your scoby may recover...it may not. If it were me, I would simply obtain a new scoby. This is one of the reasons that most folks keep several extra scobies around in a scoby hotel just in case. * -- Live and Love Well, Sandy (Jennings, FL; zone 8b) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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