When I started making kombucha, I would painstakingly make the tea, then filter it through coffee filters, and add it to one of several quart jars that had a small kombucha mushroom or SCOBY (symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast). When I was ready to bottle the kombucha, I would carefully pour the kombucha through coffee filters into a pitcher, then pour the kombucha from the pitcher into each bottle (the kombucha gets more fizzy when let to sit for a few days in a capped bottle to which a spoonful of sugar has been added – kind of like how you get home made root beer to get fizzy).

Anyway, at the end of the process, I had a bunch of sticky implements and soggy coffee filters. And it took a long time.

Now I simply used a beverage dispenser, and drink kombucha straight from the tap. I find the straight kombucha has a pleasant effervescence to it, even without bottling (though I will bottle it too, from time to time).

I start with rooibos or honeybush tea – non-caffeinated herbal teas from the leaves of bushes. So not the kind of tea that is caffeinated, but sufficiently similar to make a good kombucha.

I don’t fuss with bags and filters – I just spoon a tablespoon of loose tea into my pitcher. Then I add 2 quarts of hot water, a 1/2 cup of sugar, swirl the water so the sugar melts, and let the tea sit until it has cooled to 90 degrees.

When the tea is cool, I simply pour it through my strainer into my beverage dispenser, replace the cloth cap, secure with the large silicone band I had lying around and put the dispenser back up (it lives on my old-fashioned wheat grinder – the thing I’ll use if I ever have to grind my wheat without electricity).

I’ll sample small amounts of kombucha from the tap for a day or so. Then when the kombucha in the dispenser is tasting great, I’ll go ahead and decant my daily cups of kombucha straight from the dispenser. When the level of the kombucha in the dispenser approaches the level where there’s 2 quarts of empty space in the dispenser, I go ahead and decant a couple of bottles worth of kombucha, and brew up another 2 quarts of sweet (rooibos or honeybush) tea to top up the dispenser and start the cycle again.

If you look at the picture of the dispenser closely, you can see the small silver mark I made on the glass, which is the level to which the contents must drop before I can add 2 quarts.

Easy, probiotic, and yummy tasting.