Bottled and Labeled: Packaging is Everything!

Well, My SCOBY got to be about 1/3 inch thick and the tea still tasted a bit like an apple cider drink, but there hadn't been much change in the SCOBY for the last few days, so I decided to bottle her up.

I made a fresh batch of tea and sugar yesterday, so it was cool and ready to go. I grabbed the SCOBY and all its mess and transfered it to the new tea. I then assembled my bottles, funnel and a glass measuring cup to pour from and got to work. After each bottle was almost full, I added dried cranberries and/or slivers of fresh ginger. I left one bottle plain and some with one or the other, just to test out the flavors. Sean said that gives the Kombucha some extra fizz, so we'll see how it goes. I topped off each bottle and began making my labels.

Ok, so I come from the world of marketing and branding, so this is a very important part of the process for me. I am, however, no design guru, but I used a beautiful mandala that I colored and produced a very pretty label that I affixed to each bottle.

My beautiful bottles are now sitting, waiting for nature to take its course, and I tell ya, I want some fizz!

My new mother SCOBY is floating at the bottom of the new batch and sitting near the heater at about 78 degrees. I probably shouldn't have done this, but I put all the globs of goo from the last batch, plus one cup of tea in the new container. The globs from the bottom seemed too important to leave out and what the heck was I going to do with them anyway?

I was thinking that these globs might be good for my chickens (yes, I have two hens named Hazel and Myrtle ), but I'd have to research that a bit before I subject them to all that live active culture goo.