Hey everyone, long-time lurker, first big post. Full disclosure up front: I built the thing I'm about to describe and I sell it. But I'm posting here because you're the only people who'll understand why I built it, and the only ones qualified to tell me what's missing.

I co-run a commercial kombucha brewery in Germany, I'm originally from Venezuela, landed here 9 years ago, and our booch took Gold at the World Kombucha Awards last year, which I'm still not over. Like probably most of you, we ran everything on spreadsheets: a brew log here, a culture sheet there, a separate HACCP folder for the auditor, inventory in my head. And every "brewery software" I tried was built for beer, no liquid starter, no acidifier, no F1→F2 split, nothing that understands a living culture.

So I built BrauMo, and to be clear about who it's for: this is for commercial operations, not homebrewing. If you brew in your kitchen it'll feel like flying a 747 to the supermarket. The production math and paperwork side is what took the longest to get right:

• Production numbers that beer tools don't do: desired Brix drives your sugar additions (sugar-equivalent aware), evaporation losses per vessel, average loss tracking across the process, adaptive sugar dosing based on your actual starter-culture readings, not textbook assumptions
• Batches & readings, F1/F2 lifecycle, pH/Brix/temp/TA logged from the floor (any phone on the brewery WiFi), culture genealogy across generations with viability windows
• Compliance that matches kombucha, HACCP built around acidification and alcohol as the actual control points (KBi-aligned), plus the full grown-up FSMS stack when you need it: lot traceability, recalls & mock recalls, CAPA, retention samples, calibration logs, supplier docs, CoA. One-click batch record that has survived our real audits
• The money side, connected: COGS per batch (a scrapped ferment shows its true cost including the culture share), inventory with reorder forecasting, purchase lists from brew plans, kegs & deposits, invoicing
• Self-hosted, runs on a computer in your brewery. Your recipes and records never touch anyone's cloud, works when the internet doesn't, one flat price for the whole team — no per-seat, no production-volume tiers

The part I'm actually proud of: my own brewery runs on it every single day. Every feature exists because I needed it on the floor, not because a product manager imagined it.

What I'd love from you: What did I miss? What does your current setup, spreadsheets, a beer ERP, paper, do that you'd never give up? What would software have to prove before you'd trust it with your HACCP records? I'll answer everything in the comments.

PS, braumo.com if you want to poke at it: 21-day free trial, no credit card. I'm giving the first breweries a founding price locked for life.

One more thing: the Spanish and Portuguese versions aren't a translation afterthought. I'm Venezuelan, the LATAM kombucha scene is where I come from, and I built those versions (and a lower regional price) for the brewers building that scene right now.

Brewing my starter tank with the standard black tea + sucrose, 70 degrees about now, open air, even oxygenate a little. It suddenly hates it. Weeks go by and it has a thin pellicle, tastes tangy but sweeter than before (increased fructose post hydrolysis I assume) and stalls at 3.2 ph. I’ll wait a week after this point and nothing happens except I get more yeast in the cone.

I’ll draw from this to start small flavored batches. The black tea + sucrose ones go at a snails pace. I’ll pitch it into a Jun and it’s done in less than a week…

The culture is there. I can’t find the problem. Anyone else ever had this happen? Half tempted to turn this into an heirloom Jun culture so I don’t have to get rid of my long-term wild culture and start a standard sucrose one from scratch.

What’s you acceptable range for your starter?

hey all

i’m the person who posted in r/Kombucha about building a little kombucha app, but i wanted to ask here because this is probably the better place for the harder version of the question.

i’m not trying to drop a promo link or pretend i understand commercial production better than people who actually do it every day. i’m building this because i kept running into annoying tracking problems while brewing: dates everywhere, F1/F2 timing, batch notes in random places, not remembering exactly what changed between one batch and the next, etc.

for homebrewing that’s mostly just inconvenient. but i’m curious what the same problem looks like when you’re brewing at a small commercial / pilot / farmers market scale.

right now the app is more of a batch log than a “recipe app.” the basic idea is:

• track F1 / F2 timing
• keep batch notes in one place
• log ingredients and flavoring changes
• compare batches over time
• avoid having to do all the “wait, what day is this on?” math manually
• make it easier to see what changed when a batch turns out better or worse

but i’m very aware that this may still be too homebrew-minded.

so for people here who are brewing commercially, semi-commercially, or seriously enough that consistency matters:

what are you actually tracking every batch?

pH? Brix? TA? temperature? starter percentage? tea/sugar ratios? yeast activity? tank/container? flavoring method? cold crash time? carbonation method? shelf stability notes? bottle/keg conditioning? something else entirely?

and more importantly:
where does your current system break down?

is it spreadsheets becoming messy? paper notes getting lost? too much data entry? no easy way to compare batches? multiple people needing access? traceability? QA? reminders? inventory? compliance? cleaning logs?

i’m trying to figure out whether a simple app is useful here, or whether serious production really needs something more like a full spreadsheet / brewery management / QA system.

this will be free. i’m not trying to sell anything here. i’d genuinely rather be told “this is useless for pros unless it tracks X” than build the wrong thing.

if anyone is willing to share what their current batch tracking looks like — even just “we use a whiteboard and it works fine” — that would help a lot.

also happy to do a quick call with anyone who wants to walk me through their process and tell me where an app would or would not fit.

thanks in advance. trying to learn from people who are actually doing this properly.

Hey everyone,

I'm a small commercial kombucha producer and I'd love some input from people with hands-on experience, especially on the stability side.

My current process:

I ferment in wide, shallow open vessels specifically to maximize surface area and airflow. The kombucha stays there for 4–6 days until it reaches around pH 3.5. From there, it goes directly into a unitank together with the flavor, and I immediately start cooling it down to about 3 °C. It sits in the unitank for 2–3 days with force carbonation and then gets bottled. I'm currently adding around 4-5 g of sugar per 100 ml before going into the tank.

I want to keep the culture fully alive, so no pasteurization and no filtering.

What I'm trying to figure out:

I'm looking at which levers I can actually pull to make the kombucha more stable over time — meaning less continued fermentation in the bottle and better flavor retention. My main candidates are:

- Temperature: I'm at 3 °C right now. How much does dropping to 0–1 °C actually change things in practice?

- Sugar: I'm adding 4 g/100 ml. Would dropping this significantly help with bottle stability, and at what point does it hurt carbonation and flavor too much?

- Cold crash duration: I have 2–3 days. Is there meaningful benefit to extending this, or is the yeast reduction mostly done in the first 48 hours?

- pH: I'm ending fermentation around 3.5. Would pushing lower (say 3.2–3.3) give me noticeably better stability, or does it mainly just affect taste?

- Anything else: open vessel fermentation, transfer timing, tank pressure during cold crash anything you've found actually moves the needle?

Thanks a lot, really appreciate any real-world experience here.

I own a cafe in western North Carolina and since Helene i can not source kombucha in a keg. I used to use Buchi but I was told they closed their marshal nc location. Does anyone on here no of a place in this area that I can source kombucha in a keg?
I’ve called Booda kombucha several times and no reply.
Any info would be appreciated
Thank you

Hey, y'all, just started brewing and kegging kombucha for our coffee shop, have very little experience with kombucha generally. I'm having issues with our final pour out the tap - it's almost completely foam, and after a few minutes of settling with a full glass of foam, you get about a third glass of liquid.

My process currently is as follows:

1. Ferment at room temp for a week.

2. 2nd ferment with raw fruit puree for 2-3 days.

3. Keg and pressurize in the fridge for 48 hours, gradually increasing the pressure for the first few hours up to 45 PSI.

4. Decouple from CO2 tank, degas keg, and hook up to kegerator, where the lines to the tap are 3/16" ID and about four feet long and the serving pressure is ~8-10 PSI.

I suspect that the issue may be something specific to kombucha, as I am also brewing switchel and having issues with it not carbonating enough.

Thanks for your thoughts!

Here is an opportunity for someone to put their time in a turnkey kombucha brewery in the Los Angeles area. Please send a message if interested. Rent is low and this could be great gateway for someone looking to do the Kombucha business or move to Sunny LA!

https://www.bizquest.com/business-for-sale/turnkey-kombucha-brewery-food-manufacturing-togo-with-revenue/BW2490430/

Hi everyone,

I’m a small-scale kombucha producer based in Argentina, currently working at ~30L batches with plans to scale up, and I’m running into a recurring issue during bottling.

Here’s my process:

• F1: ~10 days, ending at pH 2.7–2.9
• F2: 48h at room temperature
  • I add herbal infusions (no sugar, no fruit juice)
• During F2, a new SCOBY forms on the surface
• After F2, I:
  • lightly filter (cloth straining, no fine filtration) to remove the SCOBY
  • bottle
  • refrigerate immediately

What’s happening:

• After ~72h–4 days in the fridge, I consistently get new cloudiness + stringy/mucous texture, basically a new SCOBY forming in the bottle
• There is some carbonation, but not much

What I’ve tried:

• Force carbonation before bottling → didn’t work well
• Adding sugar before bottling → made the issue worse
• I’m not doing sterile or fine filtration (no vacuum or microfiltration), just coarse straining

My question:

Which variables should I be focusing on to prevent this re-formation in the bottle?

Is this mainly about:

• residual microbial load (yeast/bacteria)?
• oxygen exposure during bottling?
• insufficient stabilization before bottling?
• something related to my F2 setup (no added sugar)?

Any experiences, technical insights, or process adjustments would be really helpful.

Thanks in advance 🙏

Look, I'll keep this short up top and put the full saga below for anyone who wants it.

I run a commercial brewing operation. I've been brewing beer professionally. I know my way around fermentation, yeast, sanitation, all of it. About six months ago I decided to start making kombucha and it has been, without exaggeration, one of the hardest things I've ever tried to do. Which is almost funny to say out loud. But here I am. I have a compound microscope, a digital microscope, a hydrometer, brix readings, yeast cell counts. I've tried four or five different local cultures, ordered commercial starter from White Labs twice, built a temperature-controlled fermentation chamber out of a chest freezer. Hundreds of hours. And I still cannot produce a batch that actually works the way kombucha is supposed to work.

This has gone past the point of a hobby project. It's become something I genuinely need to solve for my own sanity. I'm looking for someone who actually knows what they're doing to get on a call with me, walk through my setup, help me triage this. I'm open to paying. I just need a human being who's been there to tell me what I'm missing, because I've been staring at this thing from every angle I can think of and I'm clearly blind to something. If you've got the experience and the patience, please reach out.

---

The full story

About six months ago I made my first batch. Used a local culture down here in South Colombia. It looked promising. Nice cellulose mat formed on top, which at the time I thought meant everything was going well. But the tea just stayed sweet. For weeks. It took about a month before it got to a place where the flavor was even acceptable, and what I eventually realized was that the sourness was just layering on top of the sweetness. The sugar never actually left. Brix barely dropped. No real carbonation. I ended up diluting it 50/50 with water and adding ginger, and honestly, people liked it. But it bothered me. The yeast should have been eating that sugar. Something was wrong.

So I bought microscopes. A decent compound scope (not cheap) and a digital one. Started doing yeast cell counts on everything. And what I found was basically nothing. Like 2-3- cells per mid sized Neubauer square. Barely any yeast present. Every local kombucha I could get my hands on, every mother people sent me, same story: pH sitting around 2.7, yeast counts so low they were almost nonexistent. For context, I'm in South America, Colombia. There's not a ton of kombucha culture down here, and everything I can find commercially just tastes overly sweet. Same problem, everywhere.

I tried to work with it. Figured if the yeast counts were low, I'd try to bring them up by keeping pH higher, basically feeding sweet tea more frequently, every 3 days, to give the yeast a better environment to multiply. And it kind of worked. Yeast counts came up SIGNIFICANTLY like 10-100x. Carbonation started happening (FROTHY). Great. But then: no cellulose. No SCOBY forming at all. And the flavor went somewhere terrible. I don't even fully have the vocabulary for it. Sort of an alcohol-and-bitter combo with no acidity to balance it. Just gross. I tried this approach for months with every different mother I could find. Same result every time. Yeast up, cellulose gone, flavor wrecked.

The setup, so you have a full accounting: I built a fermentation chamber out of a chest freezer, cracked open a couple centimeters for airflow, temperature controlled at 78°F w seemat. Using a local black tea. Standard sweet tea recipe, about 8% sugar. Everything kept relatively clean and controlled.

Eventually I said fuck it, maybe all the local starters are contaminated. I ordered from White Labs. Commercial kombucha culture, one liter, rated for five gallons. Pitched it exactly as directed. Tasted weird. Some kind of strange growth formed on top that I still can't identify. I've got photos somewhere. I figured maybe that batch just got unlucky with a contamination.

So I ordered it again. International shipping logistics are a pain in the ass from down here, by the way. This time I split it across five separate containers in different locations around my house, just to rule out any airborne contamination from one spot. Same thing. All five. Weird taste. No SCOBY. That same unidentifiable something.

At this point the remaining variables I can think of are:

- The local black tea (maybe something about it is inhibiting the culture?)
- Airflow (maybe a cracked chest freezer isn't enough oxygen?)
- Temperature (maybe 78°F is too hot?)
- I just keep getting bad or compromised starters somehow

I have the tools. Hydrometer, brix, microscopes, cell counts. I just need someone who's actually done this successfully to help me work through it systematically. Step by step. Because I've been going in circles for six months and I refuse to quit. This has become something bigger than kombucha for me. It's about not walking away from a solvable problem.

If you can help, please reach out. I'm dead serious about this and eternally grateful for any guidance.

General question, how much are you keeping on hand so you can keep strength up / cater for demand fluctuations.

We’ve had a bit of a nightmare winter since Xmas with electricity out in our small fermentery. We’ve struggled to maintain temperatures where the SCOBY lives at its been down at around 16c/60.8f for a few weeks. We were well stocked so we’ve attempted to ride it out. We finally got electricity back a fortnight ago and In the past two weeks we’ve attempted 2 new batches and both failed.

I’m trying to revitalise our starter liquids but need an optimal way. There’s 3 x 60l batches. They’re all not really smelling of much, and sitting at a PH of 3.0-3.1. Would best course if action be ditiching half the liquid and receding with a strong very sweet tea? And jacking the temp up?

Edit - starters active again and about to bottle first batch in a few weeks. Thanks for everyone’s help.

Hi all! I have been researching the use of Kveik yeast for alcoholic fermentations, and all around I'm really excited about its potential for creating a clean ferment (with no weird taste additions), and the fact that it can speed up the fermentation process quite a bit. However, it seems to thrive in the 90-110^o Fahrenheit range. My micro-brewery is not that warm (and I don't want to make it too warm, because for my non alcoholic brews this would become problematic). Our ambient temperature is closer to 60 degrees Fahrenheit (a bit warmer in the summer).

Does anyone have recommendations for how they keep their unitanks warm for the alcoholic fermentations? I've been researching the use of neoprene jackets, but they seem to be more readily available for the homebrewing scale, not commercial breweries. Also I have been reading a bit about how to jerry rig a glycol system to use it for heating, but that seems like a lot of messing about with something that i'll then have to un-mess-about-with (when I want to cold crash).

Help, please, my fellow boozy boochers!

I’m obsessed with clarity. I see several commercial brands offering clear kombucha while claiming they are 'unfiltered.' This leaves me with a few questions:

The Definition of 'Unfiltered': Is there an industry consensus on when a process stops being 'straining' and starts being 'filtering'? For example, if someone uses a 5-micron or 10-micron bag to remove large yeast clumps, do they still call it 'unfiltered' because it’s not a 0.5-micron sterile plate filter?

Cold Crashing vs. Turnaround Time: Everywhere I read, people suggest cold crashing for 1-2 weeks for maximum clarity. In a production cycle, that feels like a massive bottleneck for the next batch. For those of you with clear booch: How long do you actually cold crash? Is 48-72 hours at 1°C (34°F) enough if the recipe is optimized?

Fining Agents (Bentonite / Kieselsol): How common is the use of Biofine or Bentonite in the kombucha world? Does it affect the 'probiotic' or 'raw' image of the product? If you use them, does it significantly speed up the sedimentation compared to a simple cold crash?

The Recipe Factor: I tried switched to a 70/30 Green/Black tea blend and shorter steep times to reduce tannins/proteins. What else can be done to prevent 'creaming down' or haze without stripping the flavor?

I’d love to hear your SOPs for achieving that brilliant look without the heavy equipment of a professional brewery. Cheers!"

Hi! At the brewery, we use cotton bags to infuse the tea leaves, but then it takes us a long time to clean them and remove all the tea leaves. How do you do it? Do you have any tips?