brew dog blog

I’ve been a long time gone from the blog but with this inaugural springtime post I hope to hop back on the wagon. We jammed a gig last night and I brought some of my first beer of spring, a Belgian IPA, which has been bumming me out as it seems to have “picked up a little something” somewhere in the brewing process. Its a down-the-drain batch, basically, which would be less of a disappointment if I hadn’t bottled a sixer-and-a-half of it with a little something special, the first experiment in which I hope to be a long love affair with brewing extra special mood altering beers.

Mashing of the Belgian IPA

It seems that Mother Nature has taken pity upon me for my beer failings, however, as today I bottled my first batches of home-brewed Kombucha, and they turned out better than I could have hoped for. I’ve been wanting to get into brewing Kombucha Tea (or KT, as the hippies call it) for a while and never managed to hook up a SCOBY (Symbiotic Colony Of Bacteria and Yeast!) from a friend who brews. As luck would have it, two weekends ago we were walking through Park Slope on our way to Beer Table to pick up some flip-top 33cl bottles for my homebrew from Justin, when we happened upon a table of generous yuppie-hippies giving away SCOBYs from a big jar.

Beautiful, beautiful booch...

Arriving home with my SCOBYs I immediately got to work on two batches, a regular Black Tea and Sugar Kombucha, and one I’ve been wanting to try since I first got hooked on both Kombucha and Yerba Mate, a Mint Mate Kombucha with Honey. I was wary of the Mate and Honey as I wasn’t sure they’d have enough nutrients to feed the SCOBY and ferment properly, but both batches got down to about 3.1pH after two weeks, so i sampled some of each today and they were great! The Black Tea KT I would even say was too sweet compared to the Mate, so for batch 2 I dropped the sugar down about 30%. The recipe is basically 1/4c tea and 1/4c sugar for each quart of water, but i’m working closer to 1/8c of sugar now to see how it turns out. I bottled all 3 quarts and put them back in the pantry to carbonate so I’ll post an update later on.