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I'm switching my kombucha brew from sugar to honey, since I have my own honey coming in now. I wanted to do this before, but at $48 a gallon for honey, versus $10 for 10 pound bag of organic sugar... I couldn't justify the expense.
There is also the issue of the bacteria in the SCOBY. The "mother" of the brew; it stands for Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria and Yeast. The bacteria in honey and the bacteria in the SCOBY don't "play well" together, so you have to retrain the SCOBY to work with honey. This takes several brews, using more honey and less sugar each time.
This past Friday was the 3rd brewing with honey. I'm at about half honey now. Since honey is sweeter than sugar, it's not a one-to-one ratio. I'm kind of making it up as I go.
The SCOBY is still doing its thing. The new layer that grew was a little thinner than usual, so I didn't swap as much sugar for honey this time as I had planned. In other words, I'm going more slowly and it'll take 5 or 6 brews to go to all honey, instead of the 4 that I thought it would.
Yes, I notice a difference in taste. It wasn't as sweet, so I'm rethinking the amount of honey this will take. Usually it is one cup of sugar to one gallon of tea. I had thought it would be about 5/8 cup of honey to one gallon, but it might be 3/4 cup.
If I'm right on the math, the cup of sugar was about 50¢ but the 3/4 cup of honey would be $2.25, if I had to buy my honey from Ed, my "bee guy."
Don't get me started on what our first harvest of honey cost. That's like asking how much the first egg from your chickens cost.
I could have bought at least 25 gallons of honey from Ed for what I estimate we've spent on bees so far.
There is also the issue of the bacteria in the SCOBY. The "mother" of the brew; it stands for Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria and Yeast. The bacteria in honey and the bacteria in the SCOBY don't "play well" together, so you have to retrain the SCOBY to work with honey. This takes several brews, using more honey and less sugar each time.
This past Friday was the 3rd brewing with honey. I'm at about half honey now. Since honey is sweeter than sugar, it's not a one-to-one ratio. I'm kind of making it up as I go.
The SCOBY is still doing its thing. The new layer that grew was a little thinner than usual, so I didn't swap as much sugar for honey this time as I had planned. In other words, I'm going more slowly and it'll take 5 or 6 brews to go to all honey, instead of the 4 that I thought it would.
Yes, I notice a difference in taste. It wasn't as sweet, so I'm rethinking the amount of honey this will take. Usually it is one cup of sugar to one gallon of tea. I had thought it would be about 5/8 cup of honey to one gallon, but it might be 3/4 cup.
If I'm right on the math, the cup of sugar was about 50¢ but the 3/4 cup of honey would be $2.25, if I had to buy my honey from Ed, my "bee guy."
Don't get me started on what our first harvest of honey cost. That's like asking how much the first egg from your chickens cost.
I could have bought at least 25 gallons of honey from Ed for what I estimate we've spent on bees so far.
