Will the yeast in the Kombucha colony die if left unrefrigerated for long periods of time?
The following advice is provided by Carl Mueller, a former member of the Kombucha mailing list. “I state the following based on my knowledge and experience brewing wine and beer. I feel that this is applicable here because a lot of what has been previously stated i.e., sterility, alcohol production, etc., are the same. Yeast will die in a fermented liquid after the food source has been exhausted–a process known as drying out. Yeast is also killed from long term exposure to alcohol, although the amount we make in the tea in small. When a batch is allowed to stand at room temperature for long periods of time all the food sources for the microbes are used up, and some will die, others may go into a suspended state in a cyst and survive, which ones I don’t know, and from what I have seen stated, I wonder if anyone else might know. Allowing the tea to stand for long period of time causes another phenomenon to occur, and that is oxidation. This occurs in wines when the surface boundary of C
