SCOBY stands for Symbiotic Colony of Bacteria and Yeast.
The culture used here is for brewing Kombucha.

I received a part of the mother 'cake' and instructions on how to go about this from Frantisek (Many thanks to you! :) ).

After receipt

After having received a culture of the mother fungus, the "graft" was transferred to approximately 1l of a dilution of black tea, to which blonde sugar and approximately 150-200ml of the previous incubation medium were added. (At that time it was summer and the air conditioning was at 21-23 degrees, it might have been colder at night). The diameter of the vessel was 12cm.

Although almost the entire surface was covered by the culture after an approximate 16 days, the culture still looked kind of fragile to me (this may be explained by the unstable temperature?) so I decided to give him another chance in fresh medium and in a new pot (diameter 19cm). After transfer, the whitish part of the surface still looked fine, the more bubbly part imploded -not unexpectedly.

I kept the growth medium of the culture aside to see what would happen, and if by any chance a new SCOBY would develop.

One week later

Incubation occurred for one week at constant room temperature and resulted in good growth of the SCOBY (hereafter called “Flor”) and formation of a new transparent fragile SCOBY cell layer in the previous medium from 'Flor', with some transparent cell batches floating on top (this SCOBY hereafter called “Pol”).

• Transfer of Flor to a reduced sugar and tea mixture to allow for the fermentation of a first batch of kombucha

• Transfer of Pol to 50% old medium of Flor, added blonde sugar and fresh but diluted batch of black tea amounting to a total of approximately one liter.

Both batches peacefully together in their new environment :)

Batch 1

Preparation tips

A good website that has helped me deal with all these diffrent mothers and baby SCOBYs is the following one: http://www.harmonikireland.com/kombucha-tea/
Thanks to the authors for sharing such an informative page on kombucha!

Zhe first Batch

In the meantime, a baby of the FLOR mother is brewing its first batch of kombucha, while the mother is stored in the fridge. The same goes for the POL batch, but this one has already produced the first real batch of Kombucha! YAY! :D
Wanna taste ?! :p