Scoby Experiment

I found this on http://www.foodrenegade.com/kombucha-scoby-experiment/

MY KOMBUCHA SCOBY EXPERIMENT

I began by getting my starter cultures:

• Kombucha Scoby Starter Culture #1 — A bottle of store-bought kombucha.
• Kombucha Scoby Starter Culture #2 — A dehydrated scoby from a reputable online supplier.
• Kombucha Scoby Starter Culture #3 — A fresh scoby from a reputable online supplier.

Next, I got everything ready for them to flourish — organic black tea, organic sugar, filtered water, and identical brewing vessels.

Then, I got busy growing. Here are my results.

KOMBUCHA SCOBY STARTER CULTURE #1

I followed my own instructions to a tee, just like I did years ago.

After three weeks, the new culture looked like this:

Do you see what I see? A whole bunch of nothing! Absolutely nothing grew. Sure, there’s some small bubbles. But that’s how much growth I expect to see after three to five days, not three weeks.

Okay, I thought, maybe I just got an off bottle that had been on the shelf too long.

So I bought another bottle and did it again.

It also failed.

I gave it one last shot.

It failed, too.

WHY CAN’T I GROW A KOMBUCHA SCOBY FROM A STORE-BOUGHT BOTTLE ANYMORE?

You may or may not remember the great kombucha recall of 2010. Kombucha was pulled off store shelves across the U.S. because it had been feared that some brands were too alcoholic to be sold as a regular beverage.

Most major brands reformulated their kombucha, then put it back on store shelves promising that it would no longer be possible for their kombucha to contain too much alcohol.

Whatever they did, I think they made it virtually impossible to grow a kombucha scoby from a store-bought bottle of kombucha anymore.

Some companies, like Dave’s GT, have even started adding a supplement called GBI-30 to their “Enlightened” (AKA kombucha for those under 21) bottled booch. GBI-30 is a patented pro-biotic that is non-native to the Kombucha culture.

I don’t know precisely why they added this to their formula, or how it prevents the growth of alcohol, but it doesn’t make sense to include GBI-30 in your homemade kombucha scoby. It’s not part of the normal fermentation process for kombucha, so I can imagine that it is also somehow interfering with our ability to grow a fresh kombucha scoby from the bottled brew.