percypat

Argh, Derval, Lily's labels made me squeal. And she's so tough! Definitely telling DH that he needs to grow a pair and touch it.

If you haven't tried boysenberry yet, doooooo it. Got impatient and cracked one open to have with my lunch ... Raspberries are my favourite berry, but I liked the boysenberry booch better. Need to get my thinking cap on for next week's flavourings, all your awesome combos make me feel boring!

I wondered where you'd got to with yours LadyM! With my first batch I waited 7 days to bottle and then started opening them after 2 days of 2nd fermentation. They started producing proper fizz on day 4, and the mango was the fizziest and sugariest fruit too I think - others were ginger or berry based. I should think adding more sugar to 2nd ferment would work based on that. Or you can try and get your batch fizzier in general which I believe I've managed to do: bottled 2nd batch tonight and as I already mentioned it is way fizzier at this stage than the first: stronger tea, more sugar and more SCOBY working on it as well. Got the stronger tea idea from Nadia and Susan, and Derval's recipe had more sugar so I combined the two. Your flavours sound awesome! I've only got boysenberry, raspberry and one of each of those with vanilla. Hubby really liked raspberry so we're sticking with the berries (I'm hoping to draw him in a bit more!).

KB, remember Nadia's dad decided after 5 days that he liked it and was having it like that. I waited one week, but it's your booch. Taste when you want! Big news: hubby actually got himself a glass of booch today. Just half a bottle of the raspberry, but he got of his own accord, with no offering from me. He liked it. I think it will take him awhile to get his head around the grossness of the SCOBYs but he hasn't completely lost his taste for it. We bottled again tonight and he helped me (still no touching the SCOBYs). 2nd piece of big news: strong tea fizz theory is looking good (though lots of sugar no doubt helped). This batch I just bottled was about 4.5 litres (about 1.2 gallons) and I used 12 tea bags and about 300g sugar. This stuff was fizzing like mad as we poured it into the bottles. Next batch is 10 tea bags and 1.5 cups sugar. Here is the fizz in the bigger bottle after it had a bit of time to settle (they all frothed over)

Just tried fig booch. Possible new favourite. Thanks for the idea Susan!

That he is!

Hoorah! Sending slimy, goopy vibes your way. Go Scooby! I have more SCOBY photos! For the sake of contrast. Here is my new, unplanned baby. (We'll call her a happy accident). Swimming in her jar of white tea. Isn't she lovely? And here is Frank and his first baby, in an unholy embrace. What an abomination. (Still love him though).

___________________________ Have you started Plan B yet? I think the SCOBY envy and desperate impatience is a rite of passage for every budding booch brewer. I was telling Frank (before he was called Frank) to please hurry up and grow every night and hubby was convinced I had lost my very last marble. It will happen. Soon you'll be like Susan with SCOBYs giving birth all over the show!

_______________________________ Yay Nadia! I don't know whether to high-five Frankie or be disgusted with him. He appears to be mating with his own baby (they are FUSED together now) while a new film grows all over them. Ugh, maybe he is like Craster from Game of Thrones. Your Nadia is going about this in a much more ladylike fashion. As I should expect!

Sounds like a good plan! You'll probably end up with two which wouldn't be a bad outcome! Hopefully the booch wizards will be along soon though, I'm sure they will have plenty more advice to give.

Clearly there are many ways to do this! I grew my SCOBY first in a smaller amount of liquid (bottle of plain booch, one cup of black tea and 1 tablespoon sugar) and started brewing my first batch about 2 weeks later. I know Nadia grew her first SCOBY by just letting a bottle of booch ferment in a jar without adding anything to it. I hadn't heard of growing the SCOBY and simultaneously getting your first batch of kombucha, but my experience is really limited! I'm sure Scooby is fine, Frank was very thin when I got the go ahead from the lovely ladies here and he still is, even on his second batch. Are you getting a film across the entire surface of the booch? That's what keeps happening to me and because my jar is big, it means a very wide, super thin film. So I'm not getting these nice thick spongy looking monsters that I keep seeing in pictures. The moving around the jar is definitely not a problem.

Meg, are you brewing your first batch of kombucha or just growing Scooby at the moment?

Congrats on your haul! I too am starting to think about procuring some swing top bottles. Problem is, neither hubby nor I drink. (Tummy issues for him, Asian glow for me). So either we have a house party and force-feed our guests Grolsch or I find a store which sells swingtop bottles. 1st world booch problems!

I think you might be right! They're on opposite sides of the kitchen at the moment, trying to keep it away from Frank's influence

So after all my whinging about everyone else getting smooth, pretty, pale SCOBYs, look what I found when I checked the big bottle of plain booch from last Tuesday's batch ... A gorgeous little pale round baby. This bottle isn't very fizzy so I've put some of the liquid into smaller bottles with dried fig and the baby is hanging out in the remainder. I think I'll feed it some sweet white tea and hopefully it'll keep growing. In other news, Frank and his other baby appear to morphing into an enormous Frankenbaby.

I also grated mine and it was very gingery.

I thought maybe the sugar content in the mango was higher and that helped, but who knows ... The difference between my remaining raspberry ones is noticeable and they got the same stuff! A headache, really? With hubby it's just flat-out disgust

______________________________ Ah, so not just me then. Maybe a good way to insure fizz if I want some plain! This one got fizzier much faster than all the others!

My husband loved kombucha when I brought it home from the store in a nice shiny bottle. Now that he's seen how it's made he can't bring himself to drink more than a sip. When I opened our first really fizzy bottle and gave him a taste you could see the internal battle on his face: he liked it, loved the fizz but just cannot get around the fact that it was made by our slimy friend Frank. Oh well, more for me!

Meg that sounds pretty normal to me!

I am total n00b brewer so it's all new and scary! I've been testing my bottles by pushing on the lids everyday - until today I could push them down easily, realised tonight that the mango one was hard. Gave the remaining bottles a wee check and they're not at the explodey point so will let them go a bit longer. Ooh, it's so much fun. If I couldn't taste, let alone eat, the jam I don't know if I'd bother making it ... What else can you do with them apart from flavouring booch?

A few little chunks of frozen mango and 5 days of 2nd fermentation = We had to open and quickly the close the lid a few times as the froth just kept coming. And it doesn't even taste like mango! But it's mega fizzy. Think the lack of mango taste probably comes from not enough mango, along with the fact that I used frozen. That's fine. I'll take the fizz as a big win

That sounds effin amazing!

_____________________ I had seen them, but I'd forgotten! Thanks for the reminder I have to learn to love Frank as he is

You should wait for someone more experienced but Nadia looks thicker and spongier than Frank did when I got the go-ahead! So I vote yes. How is everyone getting these lovely, pale, smooth-looking SCOBYs? Frank is such a bumpy little yeast-magnet. He needs to work on his presentation skills.