Kombucha Brewing - Day 5
On DAY FIVE the cultures have establised themselves even more. Their cellular mats (scobys) have thickened again.
A light brown bumpy scoby in the LEFT jar.
A smooth thick white scoby in the MIDDLE jar with many bubbles at the edge and a cluster of little bubbles near the centre of the scoby itself. This cluster looks like a little white alien that has landed right in the middle of a snowy landscape.
The RIGHT green tea culture's scoby has also thickened, but is far less opaque looking than the others. The big dark oogly has become smaller, probably being pushed up against the underside of the scoby by fermentation activity.
In the second picture of the RIGHT culture you can see the oogly strands dangle down into the Kombucha Tea liquid.
It is usually predictable that there will be scoby growth across the top of the liquid in any Kombucha brew. It's in the nature of Kombucha. However, the beauty or ugliness of each culture is completely random. Some will develop ooglies or one big oogly like the brew on the left, others bumpy surfaces like the culture on the right, and some are like the culture in the middle jar: quite calm and uniform except for the odd bubbles forming on the surface, tiny ones in my case, but very big in others, like a bubble gum bubble. (You are allowed to burst these, but don't have to!) I've even grown scobys as smooth a baby's bottom. You just never know what's coming! ;-)
All these phenomena are really unimportant. They are just different ways the bacteria weave the fibres of this top-hat-mat together. The more CO2 from the brewing process floats upwards, the more disturbance and resulting unevenness of the scoby.
The most important aspect of the brew is, of course, the liquid, the Kombucha Tea (KT) itself, as it is the part which we consume! Strictly speaking, it is both the liquid and the solid culture which ARE the Kombucha culture.
It is still too early to taste the liquid in this 3-some experiment. The aroma is not strong enough yet. Usually it is day 7 when I try a new KT with a straw.
With having added about 25% of acidic starter liquid this time, the brew might be ready earlier than my normal ones.
If at this stage your brew still has only a very thin skin and not much bubble activity, don't worry. Different brews will take different lengths of time. As you can see, there is even a variation in my three brews, all started at the same time.
It takes time for your yeast-bacteria microflora to multiply and get into their brewing-stride. First brews (which these are not!) usually take quite a bit longer to acclimatise to a new surrounding.
So, patience is of the essence.