Brewing Kombucha
Hey guys! I wanted to share with you all an accident I had a few weeks ago while brewing kombucha. As you can tell from the photos in this post, I burned myself pretty badly while brewing kombucha.
Have you read my 4 post series on brewing kombucha? Here is the first post and there are links in the post to direct you to the entire series if you are interested.
In this series of posts, I recommend a 1 gallon Ball Mason Jar to put your cold brewed kombucha tea in. These jars have worked beautifully for me, but I recently switched to a continuous brew system (post coming soon) and here is where I made my mistake.
When Accidents Happen…
So as I mentioned, I have recently switched over to a continuous brew for my kombucha needs. To do a continuous brew, you need a container like this one: 2.5 gallon glass dispenser.
This freed up my 1 gallon container that I mentioned above in this post. With continuous brew, you just brew whatever you drink and replace it with fresh kombucha tea.
Where I went wrong is that I brewed the water for the tea in the kettle and poured the HOT water directly into these 1 Gallon Ball Mason Jars to finish brewing the tea with the sugar and tea bags.
The water was so hot that the glass exploded and the hot liquid poured all over me.
Now I can regularly, and canning jars can handle VERY hot temperatures. What I did not remember was that these 1 gallon ball mason jars are for decoration purposes only and should NOT be used for hot liquids!
In Hindsight….
In hindsight, I remember reading that on the label when I purchased these containers, but it had been several years and quite frankly…I forgot.
I don’t want anyone else to make the same mistake as I did, so I am sharing my story. DO NOT BREW HOT LIQUIDS IN THESE 1 GALLON BALL MASON JARS!
These jars can be used to hold cold brewed tea, like I used in my kombucha posts… but please do not use hot liquids in them.
The Solution
So if you want to use hot liquids in mason canning jars, just make sure that the jars are heat treated, or made specifically for canning.
I use these Ball Wide Mouth Half Gallon Jars and they work beautifully. I now also allow the liquid in the kettle to cool a bit before adding to the canning jars. It doesn’t have to be piping hot to brew a good tea.
The key, make sure the jars are heat treated to avoid an accident like mine. More to come on how I healed this burn naturally!
Yowch! I’m so sorry you learned that lesson the hard way!
Good day, I would like to get the Kombucha and brew it myself. Im in South Africa. Please help I need it urgently.
I know that hurt. I burned myself several weeks ago. I put my hand under cool water every few minutes, then I thought I would try putting some coconut oil on it. It worked really well to take the discomfort away. Of course mine wasn’t as bad as yours, but I thought I would let you know in case you have a milder burn sometime. Without thinking, I had picked up a skillet that I had taken out of the oven just a minute before. Hope it heals well.
Julie
Μαυβε ιφif you have putted a scoby in it or aloe vera would help…
i use scobies for my skin…
But of course the extra ones and i don’t use them again…
i throw them after i use them.
To keep glass containers from reacting to heat, my grandmother taught me to put a metal spoon in first. I don’t know if this would have worked in your case, but it may be worth a try.
This is a common sense issue . The glass expanded so fast you broke its atomic structure and therefore shattered .
Another way to avoid this problem is to pour some of the water in cool first then make the sweet tea in a smaller amount so it is concentrated. You can then add the hot tea because it has a “cushion”.