The best part of making your own kombucha is choosing how you’d like to flavor it. With a steady brew at the ready, you have plenty of options for customizing your antioxidant-laden fermented tea. We’ve compiled some tips and flavoring ideas that will help you infuse fun tropical blends or classic combinations of time-tested favorites into your kombucha.

Once you’ve brewed your kombucha for 7-10 days it’s ready to drink! We enjoy ours fresh out of the fermenter and poured over ice. The flavor of your kombucha can be determined by what type of tea you use (green, black, herbal, etc.), and if you have a healthy SCOBY, kombucha can even be made without tea; like our Concord Grape Kombucha. However, if you’d like some more control and variety within each batch, you can easily add flavoring after your initial fermentation. If you like uncarbonated kombucha like we do, you can add flavoring each time you pour a glass, or you can let the flavors diffuse while in the refrigerator. Otherwise, flavoring and carbonating typically go hand in hand, during a step referred to as “secondary fermentation”. So, if you want bubbles and flavor, you will need to do a secondary fermentation. Read all about how to bottle and carbonate your kombucha during a secondary fermentation here.

We often make three different flavors per batch of kombucha, leaving us room for some fun experimentation. We primarily use fruit (fresh, frozen, dried, and even fruit concentrate), herbs and spices, and sugars to flavor our kombucha.

Fruit

Fruit makes for a bright, tasty addition to any kombucha brew. We like to chop up fresh fruit or puree it with some of the kombucha before bottling. Pureeing fruits is a great way to get more flavor and fizz at the end of secondary fermentation because it increases the surface area of the fruit that is exposed to the kombucha tea.  

Peaches, mangoes, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, apples, lemons, oranges, grapefruit, pomegranates, pineapples, and even pumpkins can make for some great flavoring blends. One part fruit to four parts kombucha is a good starting point when flavoring your brews.

Herbs and Spices

Add fresh ginger, basil, mint, thyme, hibiscus flowers, vanilla, cinnamon, turmeric, green tea, jasmine, or sassafras bark if you’re feeling particularly adventurous. You’ll want to add more herbs if they’re dried and experiment with amounts as you perfect your flavor profiles.

 Sweeteners

Carbonation depends on the amount of sugar present during fermentation, as the bacteria will turn that into CO2. If you opt for a blend of fruits with less sugar, consider adding some sweeter fruits, raw sugar, honey or maple syrup to provide additional sugars for more carbonation. Kombucha with higher amounts of sugar will carbonate faster, so make sure to keep an eye on the sweeter ones as they will be ready sooner.