My pellicle's a different color, and has small droplets of kombucha sticking through. Is it safe, or is it a weird mold?
Posted Sep 15, 2016, 5:24 AM UTC
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It's kindof hard to see what's going on in the picture, and I don't have much experience with SCOBYs (am still pretty new to the booch brewing), but the way the droplets are sitting on top of the funny surface reminds me of blue/green mold(?) that I see growing on citrus fruits (oranges, lemons) when they go rotten. Is the SCOBY surface powdery at all?
1
Yeah, looks like penicillium mold.
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It's not really powdery, but it's a little dry. The droplets appear to be the tea/booch seeping through the (thin) layer. It's pretty weird.
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What tea are you using currently? What kind of tea did you grow the scoby with? It looks like either infection or discoloration due to possible tea ingredients. I'd let it grow more and just watch it.
On second look, it almost looks like a dust mold. Does it smell musty at all?
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It doesn't smell musty, but it also doesn't yet have a super vingary smell (which is why I'd give it more time, anyway).
I brewed this using organic oolong tea (no flavors).
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Hmm. It really doesn't look normal, especially since you just used normal tea. Give it a few more days and see what the smell is, and maybe taste a tiny bit after a few days. But honestly if one of mine started looking like that, I'd toss it.
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Mold.
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Well, damn. I'll probably watch to see how it develops, but that's disappointing.
Another concern is that, as I mentioned, I've seen what appeared to be similar symptoms (but less pronounced) on other batches that I've drank (to no apparent ill affect). Should I be worried that I drank that, or does the fact that I didn't get sick mean that I'm probably okay?
1
If mold is blue, green, or white, it's gross (depending on context) but you can usually eat it without getting sick. If mold is black, it'll make you sick.
Before I became vegan, my hobby was cheesemaking. I'd leave a new cheese on the counter at room temperature to see what would develop. Usually it was just normal boring penicillium, which gives cheese a strong stilton/bleu flavour. If I was trying to make something specific, the mold contamination was bad only because it wasn't the mold I wanted, not because it would make the cheese inedible.
However, in this case I don't see penicillium (or any other mold) having a place in kombucha. You want acetobacter and yeasts only. There are many distinct strains in a SCOBY, and (especially with the yeast) there will be variation on how it looks (brown, grey, scummy, thready), but blue and powdery is not one of the possibilities.
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Just as a note, this did not grow in the circular patches that is characteristic of mold. The top is dry, other than the tea that seems to have poked through. When looking online for photos of moldy kombucha or SCOBYs, I didn't see anything like this.
I've experienced a milder version of this kind of weird pellicle before -- the slightly off color and droplets coming through -- but that batch had smelled (and tasted) great.
At this point, I just want to make sure I'm not ingesting something that will make me sick. I'm not bottling this today, but I was hoping to do so in the next week or so.
Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!