I had to dump my large vessels of kombucha because they started to smell sulfuric. Apparently this is not a dealbreaker — it does not become toxic, just really unpleasant. But I couldn’t stomach drinking more than a sip, and I felt bad after a sip, so I knew that I couldn’t serve it to anyone. Time for a retrospective.

I always boil a gallon of tap water for 10 minutes to purify it, then I bring the pot outside (with lid on) to cool faster than leaving it indoors. One night I did this, it was raining slightly, and when I came out to take in the pot, the lid had been disturbed, so I think some rain water got in to the batch, and made it stinky.

Another theory I have is that I had too many SCOBYs in each jar, and I think the SCOBY masses ended up blocking oxygen from reaching the lower portion of the jar, which could have interfered with the development of the kombucha.

I also had one jar that didn’t have enough sugar in it. In my preparation, I brewed my tea, added rose petals, and sugar, but the tea splashed everywhere when I tried to strain it out because the tea bits clogged the filter and the sugary tea water escaped. So I have changed up my method to use a smaller strainer in the tea pot to take out as much of the brewed tea leaves as possible, and then use the larger screen to filter the remainder of the tea into the kombucha jar.

I also changed the type of sugar I was using. I had turbinado sugar, but it wasn’t organic, so after I used all that up, I bought some cane sugar, which is much lighter in color, but the batch went bad.

It’s difficult to control for all of these factors, but people everywhere are doing it and enjoying it, so I’ll find my exact methodology and share it soon.

I currently have some small jars of store-bought kombucha out for SCOBY development. They are coming along just fine.

Starting new kombucha from scratch by mehron is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International