Tea brewing gets out of hand pretty quickly, once the kombucha addiction sets in -- even if you were already a tea drinker, like me. I still don't believe in overcooked tea, but it pays to adopt the base method of southern-style iced tea, using a refrigerated concentrate to reconstitute kombucha feeding solution as needed. This recipe recognizes that cheap tea comes in bags, is scaled for a normal refrigerator, and I am introducing a refinement to include green or oolong, without oversteeping.
You Will Need:
Rubbermaid 1-gallon plastic pitcher
Dollar Tree 9-quart plastic pail
Stock pot
5-6 cups sugar
~36 tea bags (the small kind) or equivalent
Graduated quart measuring cup
Fill the pitcher with 3 quarts water, and pour into stock pot. Bring to boil, pausing to pour water of appropriate temperature into teapots to brew any desired proportion of green or oolong.
Add black tea bags to the pot and steep 5 minutes. Meanwhile, set bucket in sink and pitcher in bucket. Decant green/oolong brews into the pitcher. Then fill bucket with water to same level, for cooling. If you've brewed a significant quantity of non-black tea, you may want to dissolve some of the sugar into the pitcher, while the level is low, by swirling.
Pick bags out of the stock pot, and place on a dinner plate. Squeeze tea back into the pot. Then dissolve remaining sugar in the pot. Pour into pitcher, then fill cooling bath to same level. When it stops steaming, or shortly thereafter, cover and refrigerate.
To reconstitute as room-temperature feeding solution, fill measuring cup to ~1 1/4 cup mark. Microwave 1 minute, then add 3/4 cup of the concentrate. Fill to quart mark with cold tap water, and feed your various brews as needed.
Secondary fermentations can also use the base directly, as "juice."
Submitted March 19, 2017 at 07:40PM by p38thadl http://ift.tt/2nSbUwb Kombucha
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