DIY Kombucha Cost Comparison (Everything you could need or want to know!)

Is it worth it to make your own Kombucha at home?

TLDR: If you make 2 batches or more, then you’re saving money and getting a free fancy water container thing…

Jump to Recipe

Let me start off by saying, I love Kombucha! I mean straight up, I love it… It’s one of my favorite drinks, tangy, sweet, and refreshing, a little bit fizzy, and with so many different flavors out there right now, it seems like you could never get tired of it! Don’t even get me started on the health benefits of it, I mean every time I start scrolling my phone I see something else out there about how beneficial fermented drinks/foods and probiotics are for you. My biggest complaint, the cost can be a huge pain in the wallet… I mean I’ve seen $8.00 bottles of kombucha out in the wild, and that’s not even the spiked variety (which is a whole other chapter in this fantastic book). So how much does it cost to make it at home? How big of a pain is it to do it? How easy is it to get different flavors out of it? How long does it take? And what other random stuff might you want to know?

DIY vs. Storebought Cost?

I want to answer all these questions for you (at least from my perspective), except maybe what other random stuff you might want to know, because if like me you want the answers to the universal questions then you have definitely come to the wrong guy… So let’s start with cost… before I get into exactly what DIY Kombucha costs, I wanted to cover the Kombucha that is commonly available for me to purchase in my area and how much that costs, so that when I go over the DIY you have some frame of reference. To make it simple here’s what it costs from a common supermarket and from Costco (TLDR Costco – Kirkland brand is least expensive). Also if you want to see the full Spreadsheet with the full breakdown of the numbers, Click Here!

So… now that we know that the Costco Kombucha is roughly $0.11 an Oz. (we’re working in Oz. because that gives us an even unit of measurement to compare our homemade to) we have to know if when we make it ourselves will we beat that cost and be able to do it for less than $0.11 an Oz. Spoiler here, if you read the main TLDR you know we’re about to…

To make Kombucha you need a few things:
1. A container to do the fermenting in (AKA kombuchifying)
2. The SCOBY (Basically the thing that makes kombucha, ya know Kombucha)
3. Sugar for the SCOBY to Eat or drink, or whatever the SCOBY does…
4. Tea (ideally black)
5. Time and the right temperature.

Simple so far… right? I mean could you go wild and get a bunch of other stuff, sure… but ya know do you need to? No, no you do not… so to start why waste your money and or time doing that stuff?
We’ll get down to brass tacks later on in the “Recipe” if you want the deets on exactly how to do the Kombuchifying of your sweet tea (because that’s really all that’s happening). But for now, let’s break down the costs… Also if you want to see the full Spreadsheet with the full breakdown of the numbers, Click Here!

I bought the Water Container (2 Gallon, all glass and stainless steel) on Amazon for $28.99 
The SCOBY also came from Amazon for $9.99
I bought the Tea from my local supermarket for $11.49 _{^{(The Republic of Tea Ginger Peach Tea Bags)}}
I also bought the Sugar from my local supermarket for $5.49

The SCOBY and the Water Container can be used over and over in many batches (so I consider them 1 time costs), and the Tea will make 3-4 batches of Kombucha with the Sugar making about 4.5 batches of Kombucha (so those are things you’ll have to keep buying after 3-4 batches of Kombucha.

Using just these numbers alone the first batch (all in) will cost you: $55.96 getting you about 14 – 16oz servings… not such a great deal considering that it’s about $24.85 for the equivalent amount of Costco Kombucha. Where the real magic happens is the second and third batches, where your cost drops to $27.98 and then $18.65 for your per batch costs. Finally, your 4^th batch ends up making all 4 batches cost you $13.99 per batch, about $9.00 cheaper than the Costco batches! The beauty after the 1^st batch as well is that you now no longer need to re-buy your SCOBY or your water container… you just buy the Tea and the Sugar so your costs keep going down every batch… by your 20th batch it costs you $5.92 a batch or roughly $118.53 cumulatively… comparatively if you’re buying your kombucha from Costco by this point you would have spent $497 or roughly $378 more dollars. Also if you want to see the full Spreadsheet with the full breakdown of the numbers, Click Here! At this point if I was hearing this I would have 2 questions, first: Isn’t that a boatload of kombucha… maybe? I dunno I guess it depends how much you drink, I’m in a 2 person household where we both drink a Kombucha a day, so that would be about 140 days (4.6 months) worth of Kombucha with just us having 1 a day each.

Is it Easy?

The second question/thought would be, great, I can save a ton of money, and really I’m saving just more and more money as time goes on (up to a reasonable point really, since you still have to buy the sugar and the tea)… But how much of a pain in the ass is this whole making Kombucha at home thing going to be? To be honest, in my opinion it’s really not much of a pain in the ass at all. The process is pretty simple and honestly relatively quick:
Boil some water, steep then remove the tea, add the sugar, and once it’s dissolved and the whole thing cools down to 84-68 degrees Fahrenheit, add it to the container with the SCOBY and starter tea.
The biggest pain is waiting for the first batch to finish! But that problem of waiting can be made to be part of the solution because another question that comes up is if you have the initial container, what do you do with it once its done? I mean we all like our kombucha cold, and that cold has the bonus of freezing the taste of it in time (so it doesn’t become basically vinegar)…
So the solution that I propose is: don’t stop enjoying your Costco Kombucha while your waiting for your homebrew to finish… Instead, clean, rinse, and save the bottles… because you can use these bottles to store your kombucha once it’s done fermenting (or at least done with the first fermentation if you choose to go the two-fermentation route that is…). For more detailed instructions on the first and second fermentation see the below, or jump right to the Recipe!

Plain is boring, help me out here…

So on to another of the initial questions: How do you introduce other flavors into the Kombucha? The tea I started with as I mentioned above is the Ginger Peach Black Tea from the Republic of Tea, I really like this tea in a kombucha because the Peach flavor stands forward and the Ginger flavor kind of rounds out the drink in a very subtle kind of way. But maybe you want to go less expensive (Lipton black tea from Costco), when you go this route you have even greater flexibility when it comes to your final flavor because you are starting with much more of a blank canvas… both teas yield a totally drinkable (and enjoyable!) Kombucha, in my opinion, the Peach Ginger, really doesn’t need anything at all added to it, but the Liptons Black might be a little bland or lackluster without the secondary addition of flavors in the secondary fermentation stage.

Secondary Fermentation

So what’s this Secondary Fermentation about? It’s pretty simple… Once you are happy with the flavor of your Kombucha (a process that takes 1-3 weeks and is usually closer to 2 weeks) the SCOBY will have done its miraculous work transforming the Sweetened tea into a probiotic-rich, delicious drink. At this point you have 3 options, you will have a mostly flat (non-carbonated AKA non-fizzy) drink that you can bottle (using those saved Costco Bottles, or a Swing Top Bottle) and put it in the fridge as is… This will stop fermentation but keep all those probiotics alive and well, ready to be consumed! The Second option is adding a little bit of Fruit, Fruit Juice, Herbs, or Spices to give your Kombucha a new and interesting flavor (at this point the world is your oyster and you can really add just about anything you want in almost any combination that you want). If you put this into the fridge at this point you now have a newly flavored Kombucha, albeit a still non-carbonated Kombucha. The Third Option, do what you did above (or even add a bit of straight sugar, instead of juice or fruit… If the Tea is still on the sweet side you can bottle it without adding anything), seal the kombucha, then leave it out a few days (or up to a week) to undergo the Secondary stage of fermentation. I should warn you… one risk here is the bottle exploding which is only really a risk with weak bottles… so be forewarned! (I do mine in a large bag or a box, just in case of disaster. Once the Kombucha has had a chance to do its thing, while trapping the CO2 that normally would just escape from the large water container, you end up with a Fizzy – Carbonated Drink! 

While it should go without saying, if you’re adding stuff that was not listed earlier, your cost is going to go up from what I previously mentioned. However, there are ways around this, any fruit on your counter that may be on its near last legs? Chop it, Blend it, and Throw it in! Got Fruit trees in your neighborhood, again, Chop it, Blend it, and Throw it in… Leftover juice that most likely won’t get drunk before it goes bad… again Throw it in! I think you get the idea, sure you can go out and shop for some very specific and potentially expensive things to add to your Kombucha, you can also make use of what you have and save some stuff from ending up potentially in the Landfill.

Wrap this thing up (please for the love of….)

So there you have it, the full cost breakdown and some of the questions I could predict might come up with making Kombucha… I am sure many more questions could come up for you, and I consider this a living document, so if you do have any other questions or comments please let me know them, you can email me at [email protected], or even easier comment at the bottom below the recipe and I’ll do my best to get back to you!

And after a much longer post than my average, here’s what you might ultimately be after… the Kombucha Recipe!