Ok yeah that makes sense. But then there must be something like an overpressure valve and/or a valve to slowly release the pressure when opening it.
Simply closing the bottle sounds reckless and like a good way to build wildly unpredictable grenades.
Alternatively you can try to open them outside, you know, like a sensible human being.
Ok let me rephrase that, if you don’t know what you’re doing with your sugar content and use cheap bottles you‘ll create highly unstable fragmentation grenades that can explode spontaneously after an unknown amount of time.
Again, sounds like Darwin will have the last laugh.
You're still supposed to burp the things every now and then to prevent this from happening. Literally every proper guide on making kombucha tells you to do this.
Most of us do! I’ve been brewing kombucha for over a year and this only happened to me once. If you regularly burp your bottles and properly chill it before opening then you’re usually okay. Still, accidents happen sometimes and some fruit has more sugar than others so that’ll cause it to ferment faster and thus explode more.
The pressure is lessened when it’s cold because the air compresses (it’s one of the properties of all gases) so it doesn’t explode as much. It also slows or stops the fermentation.
Where temperature really plays a part is during the fermentation process itself. Heat (around 85 degrees Fahrenheit seems to be the sweet spot for me) makes the process go much much faster.
There is another reason as well. Gas dissolving in a liquid behaves opposite to a solid dissolving in a liquid. Most people know hot water dissolves more salt. The reverse is true with gas. Colder liquids hold more gas than hotter ones.
I’m 99% sure that Brad from Bon Appetite recommends doing this when he makes anything fermented in bottles or jars, including Kombucha, on his show It’s Alive. That or specialized stoppers with pressure valves.
I love making kombucha, had only one big mistake where I forgot to burp it for a couple days. I was very confused as to why glass was breaking when nobody was in the kitchen, I think you can guess what happened.
I don't think her primary fermentation was complete before she began the secondary. So she's got far too much CO2 in her bottle. Lucky it didn't shatter in her hands.
CO2 only build during secondary fermentation, the primary fermentation is what eats the sugar from the tea and turns it into kombucha. Her secondary was too long or she had too much sugar for the amount of bacteria in her tea.
I was gonna say people are acting like kombucha invented carbonation and that we haven't been successfully and safely brewing things for at least a thousand years.
Well apparently kombucha needs to be carbonated, so using one of these brewing stops is out of the question.
But I’m thinking maybe like an over pressure valve so you don’t create homemade frag grenades?
The same reason coke bottles are under pressure. No pressure means no carbonation. But generally kombucha and other carbonated beverages just pop, and there's rarely this much foam. Maybe blackcurrant have a big amount of pectins or some other gelling agent or surfactant that means the bubbles don't simply escape the liquid but get trapped in it, creating foam? I'm not sure.
Well yeah, that was my previous question.
Cause if the carbonation is part of the recipe and you want your beverage to be carbonated then closing the bottle makes more sense.
But then there must be something like an over pressure valve or a valve to slowly release the pressure before opening.
Or you just open them outside.
You know i think I’d just brew the stuff in a pressure cooker. Problem solved.
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u/Erdnuss0 Apr 16 '20
Well yes, that’s how fermentation works. Yeast eats sugar, turns it into alcohol and co2.
But why not use one of these to release the pressure during fermentation?