Santos 3 (With Ginger!)

I cracked open another bottle this morning. This time I tried S3, or Santos 3, with Ginger. I let it sit in a 2nd ferment for 6 days. Sadly, it wasn’t again nowhere near as bubbly as my birthday ‘bucha. However, the 3 slices of ginger that I put into it gave it a really lovely bite. It was very sassy, although still a bit too sweet for my taste. I shall give it more time in the jar before bottling next time. It did produce a small scoby on the top of the jar, which is let slop into the sink. I’m really hoping that it was a scoby and not some awful, embryonic substance chock full of alien invaders that are now switching on homing beacons leading right towards my stomach and intestinal tract. As always, I drank only a small amount to see how I will react to this bottled product. 

I keep thinking that the safest way to enjoy kombucha is straight from the jar, a.k.a. “jarbucha.” In that case, I’d have to try adding ginger juice and putting the bottles straight in the fridge. Perhaps the bad press has gotten to me, but I feel safer drinking the commercial stuff. And yet, should I? I commercial kombucha really that much safer if I take every precaution possible not to infect my brews? I took Diggler down today for a visual inspection and noticed some brown spots on top of his mother. Nothing serious, just two brown spots. They don’t look like mold. They’re not green or fuzzy. They’re about half the size of a dime or less each. And now, my fear of mold has returned. I shall watch Diggler to make sure, although I know that there is really not reason to have mold. He’s not near any plants. I keep him triple covered. No one has stuck their hands in. I try to even avoid breathing over the stuff. 

I will experiment again with ginger in my blueberry Santos brew. I think it has great potential as a flavor combination. I have spilled out the remaining bottles of S1 and R1. I have considered them failures.