Why does kombucha need to be refrigerated

Extra Crispy Logo. Does Kombucha Need to Be Refrigerated? Save Pin FB More. Credit: Photo by magpie3studio via Getty Images. By Maxine Builder and Maxine Builder. View Series. All rights reserved. Or just keep it in the fridge until you are ready to drink it. If your kombucha gets warm, and its been out for a day or so, don't open it right away. Before opening it, return it to the fridge or a cold cooler as soon as possible.

After it cools down, you can open it slowly, preferably over a clean bowl in case it has gotten more carbonated. That way, in case it fizzes over, you can save the beverage using the bowl and transfer it to a glass. Pro Tip: Place the bottle in a wide mouth glass or bowl larger than the bottle itself to capture any overspill in the case your kombucha fizzes over. This will minimize the mess and make sure your kombucha doesn't go to waste!

You could also put a towel or rag over the top when you are opening it in case it does fizz over a bit to shield your face. You could, like a wine, take it out of the fridge and open it several minutes or hours before serving it to let it breathe and warm up.

Also, sometimes people find cold, carbonated beverages difficult to drink and prefer them a little warmer. We are glad you love our products. You can leave it out of the fridge overnight then return it to the fridge in the morning. Refrigeration is required to keep the culture dormant, basically asleep. If the kombuchas temperature is allowed to rise, the culture will begin fermenting any sugars remaining in the bottle. As it ferments, the flavor profile will change making it more acidic.

Eventually, it will resemble vinegar. In addition, the fermentation process will release CO2 in the bottle, and with nowhere to escape, the pressure builds inside the bottle creating a super carbonated drink. If you are lucky and catch it in time, it will just geyser out of the bottle when you open it. Pasteurized kombucha is shelf-stable and can kombucha be stored at room temperature. It will only need to be kept refrigerated after the bottle has been opened. Pasteurization is a process that uses heat to kill microbes in food products to increase their shelf life.

This is a good thing for killing harmful bacteria. The problem is, pasteurization also kills beneficial bacteria and yeast found in kombucha. By removing the living bacteria, it eliminates the health benefits provided by drinking kombucha. Knowing this, some kombucha manufacturers have then added probiotics back into the kombucha after being pasteurized. When it comes to homemade kombucha, we get asked about refrigeration on each step of the brewing process.

The four main stages consist of storing your SCOBY, primary fermentation, secondary fermentation, and finished kombucha. If you measure the antioxidant activity in kombucha, you find that it changes over a period of time. It rises to a peak, and then tapers off as you continue to ferment it.

I talk about this in my post about long-term fermentation of kombucha. Different recipes for kombucha produce different results. Both the antioxidant activity and the mix of microbes vary when you use different teas, or otherwise change your brew. See this post on how different recipes can change your scoby. If your kombucha has got Lactic Acid Bacteria in it, it will perform better as an antioxidant.

See this post about lactic acid bacteria and kombucha. In a study into Argentinian yoghurt published in Food Research International in , the Lactic Acid Bacteria levels dropped quickly once the yoghurt was put in the fridge — not staying high enough to meet the existing standards for being called a probiotic food. You can create a kombucha culture using pure yeast and bacterial strains instead of a scoby. In previous research in their laboratory they had isolated a Saccharomyces yeast strain, a Gluconacetobacter bacteria strain, and a Lactobacillus strain.

When added to sweet tea, kombucha was produced more quickly than with a traditional scoby. Similar to how bread made using pure yeast from the supermarket is quicker than using sourdough. I will talk more about this method below, because I think it has some pros and cons to it. Related: What is milk kefir? Traditional milk kefir is probiotic and antioxidant.

So, some basic research had already been done on what happens to the antioxidants in kombucha over time. And some research had been done on which probiotic microbes can be present. But there had been no research yet into what happens to these probiotic microbes over time in kombucha. How and when do those probiotics grow and flourish? How long do they last? And, of particular interest to this group, what happens when you put the kombucha into the fridge? Do you see the same drop off that was seen in the Argentinian yoghurts?

Check this starter out if you want to make your own yogurt. Also to tie in with some of their other research into tea, they wanted to compare kombucha made with three different teas.

They used black tea, green tea, and instant powdered tea. Find tea powder here , and give it a try! They made three big batches of kombucha using their recipe with the pure cultures of yeast, acetic acid bacteria and lactic acid bacteria instead of a scoby. The kombucha was fermented at 30degC 86degF , with constant shaking, for 90 hours 4 days. Shaking the cultures is standard lab technique for aerobic microbes. After the fermentations were finished, they tested each brew for three different types of antioxidant activity, and performed each test three times.

They then put their Green Tea kombucha which performed most highly in the antioxidant studies in the fridge. Every second day they took a tiny amount of the kombucha, diluted it out, spread it on agar plates, and grew them 48hrs to count how many microbes were alive in the brew. They did this for 2 weeks. They tested each of the kombucha brews to see how well they neutralized three different free radicals.