Thomas Durant - Flavour Stories
Kombucha Summit 2020

💻 [You can access the slides here]

Dispatches from Tom’s mind

👇

Introduction

We have a bit of a unique situation at Mannanova.  Yes, we produce kombucha, but more as a sideline.  Our main focus is helping you and others grow and make great kombucha with our products and services.  The kombucha we do produce is in small batches for the Coop microbrewery where our factory is located.  They have pretty much given us carte blanche in terms of creative control, which allows us the invaluable opportunity to do R&D everytime we make a new batch.  In the 4 years I have been at Mannanova, we have repeated flavors only a handful of times, and usually only by request.  We strive to try something new and learn from each batch so that we can pass this experience onto you.

Mango-Hops - The one that drinks like a beer

Challenge: Keeping sediment suspended in beverage

Solution: Emulsion using xanthan gum

This continues to be a fan favorite!  We’ve made several variations of this recipe, but the foundation remains the same: delicious hops, and tasty fruit.

The first time we made this was for hops week here in quebec.  We used mosaique and motueka hops, mango puree, with both green and black tea.  The results were outstanding!

One of the most important parts of this recipe is making sure that the dry hop is done properly, and that a cold crash is done afterwards to remove the sediment.  We use big tea bags filled about ⅕ of their capacity because the hops pellets expand a lot.  Dry hop for 24 hours at room temperature in the starter.  It’s important to massage the hops periodically, as they get lonely.  That’s not true.  It’s actually to make sure they’re properly saturated, but I like to think the added affection has an effect on the final product.  Just squeeze the bags every so often while you’re dry hopping to ensure an efficient flavor extraction.  Once the 24 hours is up, we remove the bags, squeeze them out as much as possible, and let the starter sit in the fridge for another 24 hours to cold crash the unwanted sediment.  We use a 200L open top barrel with a butterfly valve installed near the bottom for this operation.

When working with fruit puree, it’s important to use an emulsifier to ensure that everything stays suspended in your beverage.  Our favorite gum to use is xanthan, but there are many different options.  The xanthan gum is slowly blended into hot water, ideally using an industrial hand mixer.  We add the xanthan bit by bit while simultaneously blending.  The rule is: when you think you’ve blended enough, blend some more.  You will end up with a kind of translucent sirop.  Now we slowly add the mango puree while blending.  Once the puree has been added into the emulsion, we integrate it into our product using a centrifugal pump.  

A T fitting is connected to the pump intake, and we start to circulate our product in the brite tank.  Once the circulation has begun, we slowly start closing the valve controlling the intake from the brite tank, while simultaneously opening the valve controlling the intake of the emulsion.  There is a sweet spot where the product is still circulating, but the emulsion is also being slowly pumped into the tank.  The integration should happen quite slowly so as to ensure a good blend.  The centrifugal action of the pump helps us to blend these different components even more.

The product is then cooled, carbed, and packaged.  This is an excellent option for those who don’t necessarily want to be drinking alcohol, but love having a beer at the end of their day.  It’s fruity, hoppy, and sips like a beer.  Cheers

Clementine - The one that ages well

Challenge:  Create a kombucha that gets better with age

Solution:  Simple ingredients

This was one of the first GREAT kombuchas I made at Mannanova.  We wanted something simple and elegant that would age super well.  

Every year around christmas is clementine season.  It’s one of my favorite fruits to eat, and I wanted to recreate the sensation of peeling and eating a fresh clementine in a kombucha.  Starter, green tea, sugar, Manna-K, and fresh clementines are all the ingredients you need to make this delicious beverage.

You’ll need to begin by washing, cutting, and pressing your clementines.  To this day we still do all this by hand, but you can use a machine if one is available.  Don’t throw away your peels, because you’ll need them for the bite and the aromatics.  Ideally, you want between 2-3% freshly squeezed juice and just under 2% peels.  Throw all this deliciousness into your starter, and let it soak overnight.  (We like to use a 200L open top barrel onto which we’ve installed a valve near the bottom.)

Now you want to infuse your green tea and dissolve your sugar.  We use 1g/L of green tea to give this flavor some bottom.  We’re shooting for a final brix around 5.  You’ll need to calculate how much sugar to add based on the brix of your fresh juice which can vary.  Infuse your tea, dissolve your sugar, and pump all this into the brite tank to cool.  I like to add water up to 65% or so of my final volume so everything is nice and cold and I can carb quickly.  Make sure to leave room for starter (20%) and Manna-K (2-4%).

The following day, remove and squeeze out your bags of peels as much as possible.  Then pump the clementine infused starter into your tank and re-circulate.  Adjust with Manna-K and sugar to your final pH and brix: we’re shooting for around 3.3 pH and 5 brix.  Now for the secret ingredient:  bergamot flavor extract.  We love to put just a bit of this to give some brightness.  Add to taste and re-circulate.  It’s always a good idea to do a small scale test to get just the right amount.  Cool and carb to around 2.5 volumes CO2.

Your final product should be bright, crisp, refreshing, and to the nose, it should be reminiscent of peeling a clementine.  I make at least 2 batches of this a year because it’s so popular.  We had a keg kicking around for about 8 months of the last batch I made, and when we plugged it in we were all very pleasantly surprised how well it had aged.  It had actually gotten better!  The aging gave it some real character, but the flavor and balance was still right on!

Watermelon - The one that everyone loves

Challenge: Instability using watermelon

Solution:  Extended cold crash

This year we finally decided to take a shot at a watermelon kombucha.  I had been reluctant because I know how much trouble it has given others.  See, watermelon is one of these fruits which, similar to pineapple, can be really volatile in a kombucha and is often very unstable.  I can’t count the amount of clients we have spoken to who have tried their hand at this only to end up with watermelon bombs. So, challenge accepted.  We wanted to see if we could get a kombucha with a lot of watermelon flavor, but without the instability.

The first step: buy a heck ton of watermelon.  (Insert photo)  Second step: juice a heck ton of watermelon.  We have a green star juicer, and it worked great for this!  Yes, it took a long time to juice 40 watermelons, but once again, I like to think the love, care, and vibes put into the preparation has an effect on the final product.  Like the time we played sexy music to our purple cherry kombucha the entire time it was in the brite tank.  (BTW My Spotify algorithm has never fully recovered and still thinks I love Barry White.)  You could definitely taste the sexyness!

We infused both green and black tea as well as hibiscus flowers to accentuate the color.  Dissolve your sugar in the infusion.  Shoot for a brix of 5.  Pump all this goodness into your brite tank, and add Manna-K if you use it.  Finish with water to your final volume, and re-circulate.

The final product had a ton of watermelon flavor.  It was absolutely delicious!  The sweet and sour blended to give us something that tasted like a Jolly Rancher. 

Normally, we would carb and package within the next 2 days, however we didn’t want to end up with a volatile and unstable batch.  We decided to cold crash.  We cold crashed for a week.  Nine days to be exact.  This left plenty of time for the yeast and watermelon particles to fall to the bottom of the tank.  We then proceeded to keg through the racking arm, turning the arm until the color changed, and purging the sediment and yeast rich bottom of the batch.

We bottled 1 liter of this, and left it at room temperature (in a closed bucket) to see if our technique worked.  One week later, the flavor had not changed one bit, and the bottle, though slightly ballooned, did not look like a ticking time bomb.  Another week later, and we were surprised to still see no attitude from our watermelon kombucha.  The cold crash had done the trick.  Our product was packed full of flavor and as stable as anything we had ever made.  This one did not last long and was devoured by the public.  

Bloody Booch - Our bloody mistake

Challenge: Create a bloody kombucha that can be blended with beer

… Fail!

Yes, we did it…  But we wouldn’t recommend that you do!

 It had been a couple of years that I had wanted to try this.  Our factory is in a Coop beer microbrewery, and our kombuchas are on tap next to 30 or so delicious beers produced by Mabrasserie and their partners.  The goal was to have a kombucha we could blend to make a bloody beer.

It was tomato season, so we bought some fresh super san marzano tomatoes from the market.  We also got some fresh celery and horseradish.  The celery and horseradish were juiced in our green star, and the tomatoes were blended with a hand blender.  We separated the tomato pulp from the juice and put it in big tea bags.  The celery juice, tomato juice, and tomato pulp was then mixed with our starter in a 200L open top barrel, and left overnight to soak.  

We really wanted some spiciness, so we decided to hot infuse the horseradish pulp with our black tea and some Montreal steak spice.  We ended up cold infusing all this for 18 hours as well because we weren’t satisfied with the level of spice.

The next key ingredient we knew we would need was annatto.  This was the one that would throw us for a loop.  Annatto would help to achieve that clamato juice flavor, because clearly we couldn’t use clam juice.  The challenge with this was how to keep it suspended, as it is an ingredient that isn’t water soluble.  Normally, we would use xanthan gum, however, we learned through experience that when you mix a kombucha that has xanthan with beer, the xanthan gum separates and creates a less than appetising beverage.  So we had to try a different gum that wouldn’t separate when blended.  In comes carboxymethyl cellulose.  We thought it would do the trick…  We were wrong.  It didn’t separate in the beer, but it did a crap job of keeping the particles in suspension.  What to do?  Well, we were left with a product that when poured, all the sediment would separate and fall to the bottom within 30 seconds.  This was not acceptable.  Someone had the idea to use corn starch, and it was either that, or scrap the batch.  So we tried it.  We blended the cornstarch in some hot water, and slowly integrated into our kombucha.

Unfortunately, we were still left with sediment that settled in the bottom of the keg and the glass.  We tried telling the bar and other clients who bought this kombucha to shake up the keg each time before serving, but this was also less than ideal.  In the end, we credited any client who bought this flavor and ended up tossing a bunch of product.  Eight months later, we found a keg of this hiding in the fridge.  I was hoping that, like a lot of our other kombuchas, it would get better with age.  So I shook up the keg to redistribute the sediment, and plugged it into our kegerator.  It did not get better with age.  It was weird.   The moral of the story?  Don’t do this.