Tutorial: How to make Kombucha Tea

There are plenty of tutorials out there for making Kombucha, and now there's one more. Someday I'll do a video one for YouTube, but for now the written word will have to suffice. My main complaint for most of the tutorials I have read, is that they don't have enough pictures and don't follow through to the bottling process. If you've never cultured something before it can be a bit mysterious. Fortunately, Kombucha is really easy!

What is Kombucha? Well, Kombucha is a fermented tea made with a particular strain of beneficial bacteria. This bacteria produces a spongy mass commonly referred to the Kombucha mushroom, although strictly speaking, it's not a mushroom. The mushroom is where the bacteria lives and grows.

A lot has been said about the beneficial effects of drinking Kombucha. According to the Synergy web site, Kombucha helps the health "mostly through its influence on the liver, the blood and the digestive system, where it normalizes the acidity or pH. Metabolic balancing and detoxification is perhaps the most important function of Kombucha."

Lord knows I need more of that.

Personally, I love the stuff and feel more energized on the days when I drink it. You can drink 1-3 cups a day, but any more won't increase the benefit.


What you'll need:

• 8 green tea bags. I used Lipton, but your local health food store has some good organic ones. I also used 1 Numi organic iced tea bag in the Citrus Black flavor. Yum!
  
• a 1 gallon glass jar or sun tea jar
• 1 coffee filter - to fit over the mouth of your jar - 10 to 12 cup size
  
• 1 rubber band - to fit around the mouth of the sun tea jar
• 1 C. white sugar (you can use turbinado or organic too)
• 1 bottle of Synergy Kombucha and/or a Kombucha mushroom (I'm using both). You don't need a mushroom to start the culture. The Synergy Kombucha tea is enough.
  
• 1/4th C. apple cider vinegar (if you're making your first batch)
  
• a 1 C. measuring cup
• a wooden spoon
  
• 1 gallon of filtered water (you won't need all of it)

A few things to remember:

• Kombuch is alive and needs to be handled with clean instruments. Please wash your spoons, cups and jars with MILD soap and rinse thoroughly. Residues of soap will hurt your culture. Please wash your hands too.
  
• Prolonged contact with metals other than stainless steel will injure Kombucha as well. My Kombucha mushroom above is in a stainless steel bowl.
  
• Filtered water must be used because chlorine will kill the Kombuch culture.
  

Let's make tea!

• Put 6 C. of filtered water into a pot and bring it to a boil.

• Drop your tea bags into the boiling water, cover and turn off the heat. It's very important to turn the heat off, or you'll lose too much of your liquid and damage the flavor of the tea.

• Leave covered for 20 minutes.
• While the tea is steeping, put filtered water in your sun tea jar. I put 4 inches of water in the jar. This is to keep the jar from cracking when I add the hot tea. I'm too impatient to wait for the tea to cool so I use this method and haven't cracked a jar jet.
  

• Add 1 C. of sugar to the water in the jar and stir with your wooden spoon till it's dissolved.

• Uncover your tea and take out the spent tea bags. Let the tea cool for a few minutes more.

• Pour your tea into the sun tea jar and stir with the wooden spoon. Put your hand on the jar to see how warm it is. If it feels hot, wait a bit to put in the live Kombucha culture. The jar should be room temperature or slightly warm to the touch or the heat may kill the Kombucha.

• Once the tea is cool enough, add 1 C. of the Synergy Kombucha drink and stir a bit

• Add your Kombucha mushroom, if you have one. There should be room at the top of the jar for the mushroom to grow, so you don't want the liquid to go higher than the bend in the glass. If the tea seems low, you can add more filtered water.
  

• Add 1/4th C. of apple cider vinegar (if you're making it for the 1st time)
• Cover the mouth of the jar with the coffee filter and secure it with the rubber band. The Kombucha mushroom will rise to the top eventually and start making a baby mushroom on top of the mother.
  

• Put the jar in a warm spot (I have mine outside, in the shade of my orchid plants). The temperature should be between 72 and 90 degrees Farenheit. The warmer it is, the faster your culture will grow. No direct sunlight though, or it will die...
  

• Wait 7 days and then taste your Kombucha. It should have a pleasant sweet and sour taste and be fizzy. I've allowed my tea to brew for up to 2 weeks (it will become more vinegar-like with age) with no ill effects.

Don't despair if the top of your first Kombucha looks like something the cat barfed up. The culture takes a full week to get going and your first mushroom will be thin and a bit patchy looking. It may have some dark stringy stuff hanging down on the underside as well. No problem. That's a natural part of the culture.

• When your Kombucha is done, you can bottle it up with fresh strained juices. You will want to strain any fresh juice as the little pieces are unappetizing. Citrus fruits and berries are my favorite combination. You can put in whole berries and citrus peels too. The Kombucha will continue to ferment once it's in a bottle, just not as much once the lid is on. Be careful of Kombucha that has been bottled with fresh juice, as it will become VERY carbonated. Refrigerate it to keep it under control.

• Bottle only in glass bottles or jars with a tight lid. I just use old Synergy bottles and lids that I've run through the dish washer. It's not like the canning process where you have to sterilize everything. Clean and dry should be good enough. Just make sure you don't get your fingers in everything. Hands are really dirty!
  

• I have kept my bottled Kombucha for up to a year, unrefrigerated with no problems. If you have any doubts, just keep it in the fridge.

Voila! You've made Kombucha. Easy stuff too and sooooooo good for you. I highly recommend trying out the Synergy brand Kombucha tea. They make many flavors and all are delicious. My favorite is Trilogy. Even though I make it at home, I still buy bottles of Synergy. Yum-O!

Some day I hope to make as good a tea as they do!

Whole Foods Market carries Synergy as well as many health food stores across the nation. The Synergy web side can help you find a store in your area.

Tutorial: How to cap your own herbal pills

Today I'm going to show you how to cap your own herbal pills. I decided to do this because of the very good cost savings and because I'm a do-it-yourself control freak. It's a bit fussy and took several hours, mostly because I had to 'grind to a powder' one of the ingredients (Bitter Melon, in the photo above) before I could pill everything up.

My coffee grinder was not exactly up to the task. It ground up the Bitter Melon well enough but got overheated and pooped out before I could do it all. I got enough to do my blend though...

First, buy your herbs! The photo above is dried Bitter Melon. I use the wonderful Internet site Mountain Rose Herbs. They've been in business since 1987 and have a large selection of loose herbs, teas, oils, tinctures, extracts, spices, and hydrosols, as well as containers, tools and utensils and assorted other yummies. Their prices are very competitive and the web site is a breeze to use.

The vast majority of their herbs are either organic or wildcrafted and are of a very high quality. My sister and her husband have been using them for years and are very pleased with their service. I got my first shipment from them several days ago and am very happy with my purchase.

I decided to make a herbal concoction to help me balance my blood sugar and curb my food cravings. My research led me to a combination of herbs and trace minerals that I hope will do the trick for me.

Here's the list of ingredients:

Banaba leaf extract 

Fenugreek
Gymnema Sylvestre 

Bitter Melon
Cinnamon

I take these two separately. They're not going into my blend but they're a part of my daily blood stabilizer combination.

Chromium Picolinate 

Policosanol


Next, the recipe!

Based on some of the herbal concoctions I have been researching, I came up with this proportionate recipe for the herbs I intend to cap. I bought both the Chromium Picolinate and the Policosanol at my local Health food store already capped. Both of these require very small amounts to be consumed every day and I couldn't cap them accurately myself.

• 1 part Banaba leaf 
  
• 5 parts Gymnema
• 5 parts Cinnamon
• 5 parts Fenugreek
• 10 parts Bitter Melon

26 parts total in each pill and to make up my batch. I decided to use 1 quarter cup as my 1 part measure.


I decided to use size "0" vegetarian capsules (again from Mountain Rose Herbs) which hold approximately 680 mgs of material. Using this number as the basis of my math, I figured that if I have a total of 26 parts of herbs in my concoction, that each part will weigh 26.15 mgs (26 divided into 680 mgs)

This means that in each pill there will be:

• 26.15 mgs of Banaba Leaf Extract........25.3 grams per 1/4th cup
• 130.75 mgs of Gymnema Sylvestre.......24.9 grams per 1/4th cup
• 130.75 mgs of Cinnamon...................24.3 grams per 1/4th cup
• 130.75 mgs of Fenugreek...................26.9 grams per 1/4th cup
• 261.5 mgs of Bitter Melon..................18.8 grams per 1/4th cup

These amounts are approximate, but reasonably accurate.

I also weighed each herb as I measured it out by the quarter cup. The weights are also listed above.

My annoying little coffee grinder and the bag of powdered Bitter Melon. 

Weighing the herbs. I'm lucky enough to have a very nice scale that weighs in grams, so this part was easy. Accurate weights are important if you need to be careful with your proportions. For this blend it's not essential, but I like to keep track of what I did in detail.

My Bitter Melon is done, so now it's on to assembling my blend of herbs. As you can see, I have my scale, a notebook for recording all the weights and stuff, measuring cups, the herbs and my trusty cup of coffee which will soon be off limits. Boo-hoo....

I used a 2 lb. sugar container to hold my herbal blend and it fit very well. Full to the brim, in fact. I spent a few minutes shaking the container to mix all the herbs well. I also wrote the recipe of the herb blend on a post-it and taped it to the container. So, when I need to remake it, I won't have to go dig up the recipe. The total amounts of each herb in my blend was as follows;

• 1/4th C. Banaba Leaf
• 1 1/4th C. Gymnema Sylvestre
• 1 1/4th C.Cinnamon
• 1 1/4th C.Fenugreek
• 2 1/2 C. Biller Melon
  

6 and 1/2 cups total.

I didn't compute the amounts correctly on the label and had to change it later, so the amounts listed in the photograph are wrong. I did catch my mistake though. The amounts listed above are correct.

Time to cap the pills!

The assembly of the Cap-M-quik tray was beyond simple. You just put the little end pieces on the outer pegs, turn the higher side towards the inside of the tray and lower the holder piece with all the holes in it onto the 4 inner pegs.

Following the instructions on the back of the Cap-M-quik box, I pulled each cap apart and put the longer one into each of the holes in the tray. 50 holes in all. I put the short end in a little bowl for safe keeping.

Then I took about 1/4 cup of my herb mixture and spread it across the top of the tray. I used the little card scraper to move the herbs into all the little holes. There's no need to use any force to cram the herb in, it drops in nicely.

This is what happens when you don't read the simple instructions carefully enough. I pulled the tray off all the pills instead of turning the little end pieces and lowering the tray completely. I did it right the second time around.

Then just put the little ends back on the top of each pill and pull it out of the tray. I usually pushed the cap completely on once I got it out of the tray. They seem to click into place when on well. 

This Italian herb bottle was perfect to hold 300 of my newly capped herb pills. It took 1.5 cups of my herb blend to fill these 300 pills, and since each batch makes 6.5 cups, I end up getting about 1300 pills per batch. All told I spent 3 or 4 hours doing the whole thing, but I was computing, grinding and photographing too, so it will take you less time to finish without all these extra tasks.

I spent almost $80.00, including shipping, for all the herbs and the capsules (NOT including the chromium, $5.49 or the policosanol, $16.99). I bought a pound of each of the herbs except the banaba which was 3.3 oz. (The Cap-M-quik was $12.35, but as one time purchase I didn't include it as a part of the herb price.)

Since I get 3 and a half batches of herb blend from the amounts that I bought and I get 1300 pills from each batch I make, I end up getting about 4550 pills. ( I only get 2.5 batches from the Bitter melon, so add $10.00 to the cost.) The extra cost of 4000 more empty caps is $96.00. Since most pills come in 60-90 count bottles, at 90 pills per bottle I end up getting 50.5 bottles of herb blend for $186.00. That's $3.68 a bottle. Not bad, huh?

Happy capping!