Kombucha vs. SCOBY, Why We're Named “Incorrectly”

It wasn’t that long ago that kombucha as we know it was a little known health trend bubbling up in LA. Taken from hippie back to the lander culture, taken from East Asian and Russian culture, this culture has made moves in the world faster than a colony of bacteria and yeast.

So, maybe you’ve tried kombucha, heck maybe you’ve even tried brewing it at home, the point is A LOT more people are familiar with kombucha than they were even five years ago.

If you have brewed your own ferments, you’re familiar with the friendly alien pancake that is responsible for the probiotic magic within kombucha. The widely celebrated, yet relatively unknown, SCOBY. if you haven’t here’s a little crash course on how it works.

How to Make Kombucha (Approximately 1 Gallon or 3.7 Liters)

1 SCOBY
1 Gallon / 3.7 Liters Black Tea (warm but not hot)
1 cup of sugar (cane or white sugar)
4 cups / 1 Liter Kombucha Starter Liquid aka Unflavored Kombucha

Combine the above ingredients and let the scoby sit in a dark and cool area. It’s important to cover the lid of the container with a breathable material like cloth (old t-shirts work great). After a few weeks, check on your brew, there should be a beige-y film or material on the surface. Rejoice! You have done it, you’ve made kombucha, or rather created an environment for your kombucha to be made. Taste and drink when the kombucha reaches your ideal flavor.

SCOBY stands for “Simbiotic Colony of Bacteria and Yeast” - it is a gelatinous like substance that forms on the top of kombucha brews to trap the bacteria and yeast within the brew underneath its loving folds close the system off from air (as best as it can). When this little flapjack is disturbed, when you empty the container or add more tea, it grows a new layer and soon you can have kombucha mother SCOBYS grow to be a foot tall. Each new layer, like the rings of a tree, signify a new scoby growth.

The amount of scobys can get out of hand quickly, so the material is usually given away or discarded, especially in commercial settings. We take this naturally occurring biomaterial that is made up of cellulose and turn it into paper. SCOBY cellulose is not all too different from plant cellulose, say the kind you get from hemp fiber or tree pulp other than the fact that it is an entirely renewable, low-cost material which also happens to be a bi-product of another industry.

So, all that is to say, even though our papers aren’t technically made from Kombucha, we wanted to get the point across as simply as possible that these papers are different.

These papers contribute to a world in which manufacturing is seen as a circular process rather than a linear one. When it comes to low waste, we’re walking that walk. By using Kombucha Papers, you can make one small step towards a more sustainable future one puff at a time.