I would like to try flavoring my kombucha. I have heard you can add herbs like mint after fermentation, before botteling.
But then I would have the leafs in by bottles, right? Or do I have to take them out after some time?
What about putting the mint into my fresh tea before fermentation? Doesn't it harm the SCOBY?
Don't add anything with oils (eg. herbs, herbal and fruit teas) to your initial brew. The flavours will stay in your scoby and the oils will go rancid and impair future brews. Add it to your bottles for the secondary ferment and just remove or sieve before serving.
We use flavoring ingredients like herbs and berries during the initial steep. We don't add anything after the fermentation. We use mint in one of our recipes, and it works well. The advice I would give you is that some ingredients can hamper bacterial growth (for example, we've found that ginger can slow down the fermentation a bit, and rosemary as well) and some change flavor during fermentation (e.g. hibiscus turns very bitter, but rosebuds turn more fruity).
We've not had any issues with oils going rancid in the SCOBY as witek suggests, but we also pull our SCOBY every batch and only use rich starter. When we were brewing in small batches, however, we would use our SCOBY for 3 brews or so, and didn't see that effect then either.
Like anything else in life unless you want to drink and serve/drink the final product with the leaves in there pull them out once you've gotten the flavor profile you want before bottling.
