Cleaning your kombucha materials
Properly fermented kombucha has a low, acidic pH that's naturally inhospitable to harmful pathogens — so you do not need to sanitize or sterilize your materials. This is not like brewing beer, where cleaning is almost as much work as the brewing!
Cleaning your kombucha materials · Watch on YouTube
Cleaning tips
- Long, hot rinse for brew vessels and bottles. Yeasty or crusty bits stuck to the glass come off with a clean sponge or scrub brush.
- Check your sponge! This gets overlooked constantly: make sure there's no mold on the sponges or brushes you clean with — kitchen sponges are some of the dirtiest objects in our homes.
- A bit of dish soap is fine for bottle mouthpieces and especially sticky, gunky residue.
- Dishwasher works for glass vessels on the hot setting — without any detergent (skip the Cascade/JetDry).
- Always rinse thoroughly.
Now for some no-nos
- No antibacterial soap. It's unnecessary, and there's always a chance you don't rinse it all off — and antibacterial residue is exactly what your kombucha's bacteria don't need.
- No "vinegar cures." Lots of homebrewers recommend rinsing vessels with distilled white vinegar; Ange finds it unnecessary and a potential risk.
Why no vinegar?
As covered elsewhere on this site: kombucha is itself a specific type of vinegar culture, and other vinegars are made by different vinegar cultures. Repeatedly exposing your SCOBY to a different vinegar culture — even in small amounts — can gradually throw your kombucha culture out of balance… which is fine if you want to make vinegar, but not if you want to make kombucha.
Some brewers say a 50/50 vinegar-water "cure" rinse is harmless, and it's true that one small exposure won't transform your SCOBY overnight. But over time, those little exposures add up — and suddenly your kombucha is coming out too sour, the flavor profile is off, the fizz is gone, and you're wondering why your symbiosis isn't balanced. When hot water and a little dish soap do the job completely, there's no reason to take the risk (or waste the vinegar).
Thankfully, kombucha is low-maintenance on cleanup. Don't overthink it.