Quote:
Ukyou,
If you look at Bragg's cider vinegar it is unfiltered and unpasteurized. It looks different from most grocery store vinegars. Vinegar does contain it's own mother called mother of vinegar(MOV). It is different from a scoby (kombucha mother) in that MOV is living acetic acid culture. Komucha, mother is a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast. A lot of recipes call for pasteurized cider vinegar to start a batch of kombucha. This is to increase the acidity and make the environment more hospitable to the cultures of the scoby. NOTE. that is was pasteurized because unpasteurized would make kombucha vinegar...or something like that. You probably could make kombucha in a similar way as you vinegar recipe. But, who knows what would really grow? Besides inoculated with ready made culture and/or mother is simple and quicker. If you think about most of the things we are doing on this thread, sour dough bread, fermented vegetables, kefir, etc, we could start with the wild active bacteria in our environment, but because it is easier we inoculate with culture we WANT to grow. This also crowds out the stuff we don't want to grow.
So I guess the short answer to you question in that we call them both mothers, but they contain different organisms.
