The Tea Mistake You Need To Avoid When Brewing Your Own Kombucha

Over the past few years, you may have seen kombucha pop up in more grocery stores and on-tap menus across the United States. If you haven't tried the drink, there are a few things you might want to know about kombucha. It's a fermented drink made with tea, sugar, and yeast with a vinegary taste, and although you may have heard that kombucha has probiotics and other health benefits, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln says that there aren't many medical studies that back up these claims.

Still, if you like the drink and go through bottles quickly, it could be a fun challenge for foodies to make kombucha at home. Just be prepared for the fermentation process to take some time! There's a lot to learn about brewing kombucha, but one important component is the type of tea you use in your recipe.

This home-brewed kombucha tea recipe is a great place to start, and you'll need to gather some green tea or black tea bags. If you don't have black or green tea bags, you'll want to make a trip to the grocery store before you make kombucha. Otherwise, you might not see the results you want.

Kombucha lovers know that the key to the drink is the SCOBY, and Healthline explains that this stands for "symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast." The SCOBY is necessary for the kombucha fermentation process, and your SCOBY needs the right kind of tea for a fizzy kombucha.

According to Bon Appétit's Brad Leone, the best type of tea to use in homemade kombucha is black tea because a SCOBY will react best with the tannins in black tea. Leone explains that you can use a combination of teas and he typically makes his kombucha with a combination of black and green tea, but you should never use white tea, yerba mate, or any other low-caffeine teas as the only tea in kombucha. If you love herbal teas, Brew Buch provides some options for a kombucha base, like rooibos and hibiscus tea. Of course, there's the caveat that you should also be adding some black tea or another type of tea to the mix.

In addition to finding kombucha in more stores, customers can also find hard kombucha in the alcohol aisle. While you can certainly brew kombucha at home, making hard kombucha adds another layer of difficulty. Instead, we've rounded up some of the best hard kombuchas of 2022 for tea lovers to try.