Recipe: Chocolate Strawberry Kombucha

Valentine's Day is all about showing love and attention to the people you care about. At Escarpment, we love our customers and we love Kombucha, so it’s the perfect time to share one of our favorite recipes with you. We might be biased, but what's more romantic than promoting good gut health and homemade kombucha?

This kombucha is very refreshing, with lots of strawberry flavour and a hint of chocolate that is not overpowering. This kombucha is also unique, as it is not tea based like most kombucha drinks are. Instead, we decided to experiment using chocolate as the base and to our surprise, it worked like a charm! We hope you love this iteration of kombucha as much as we do, and share it with your loved ones this Valentine’s day! 

 Ingredients:

• 2 tbsp of cocoa nibs, if you want a more traditional kombucha taste replace 1 tbsp of cocoa nibs with english breakfast tea
• 60 g of sugar 
• 1 Escarpment Labs SCOBY, or one from your SCOBY hotel
• 1 L of water
• ½ pint of fresh or frozen strawberries (For second fermentation)

Steps:

1. Boil 1 L of water 
2. Add boiled hot water to a heat proof container (I like using a 2L mason jar)
3. Add sugar and cocoa nibs and stir to incorporate
1. If using black tea only steep for 5 minutes 
4. Leave out at room temperature until the tea is cooled
5. Add the Escarpment Labs SCOBY pouch. Alternatively, if you have an existing SCOBY hotel add one solid SCOBY plus 100 g of liquid 
6. Cover with a coffee filter and leave for 7-10 days
7. Wash and cut tops of all strawberries
8. Crush up 130g of prepared strawberries
9. Use 2 500mL swing top pressure safe bottles and add 65g of strawberries to each bottle
   Hint: If you don’t have any pressure safe bottles feel free to do your second fermentation the same way as your first. This will mean that there is no carbonation in your kombucha but you can add some by adding a neutral carbonated water to taste.
10. Using a strainer, filter the kombucha to remove the cocoa nibs and SCOBY
11. Top off your bottle of crushed strawberries with approximately 400g of your fermented tea
12. Seal the bottles and place them on the counter for 3 days
13. Before serving you can strain to get rid of strawberries if you prefer less chunk 
14. Serve chilled, & enjoy!

And there you have it, the perfect kombucha to share with your forever Valentine! Let us know what you think and tag us on social media (@escarpmentlabs) to let us know how your Chocolate Strawberry Kombucha turned out! 

Looking to make your Kombucha-brewing even easier? Try our Kombucha Kit, complete with everything you'll need to start your first 1-3L of Kombucha, including our SCOBY Culture.