Pineapple jalapeño - The craziest sounding, most awesome tasting secondferment Kombucha to date!

This kombucha recipe came about through a lacto-fermented pineapple with jalapeños recipe from oh, lardy!.   If you would like to read my post about the lacto-fermented pineapple, please click here.

I'm here to tell you, that these fermented pineapples or one of my absolute favorite treats! It is really the only way that I'm getting fermented food into my diet right now. I have actually eaten so much of the pineapple that I burned my tongue. 

Seriously. 

It's that good. So you should absolutely try them, but I digress...

After having the awesomeness that is the pineapple I started to wonder if I could translate that into a drinkable beverage and, of course, I went directly to kombucha as my base. The complex flavor and sourness from the fermentation of the tea gave the drink the same indescribable combination of flavors that I talk about in my post on the lacto-fermented pineapple with jalapeños. It's a flavor that hits all five of the Chinese Five Spice Doctrime flavors. It is a completely complex, full, and well-rounded flavor. As a drink, it is hard to nail down exactly what ingredients are used to make this particular flavor, but it's really amazing.

And now, for the recipe:

• Start with a half-gallon of kombucha that is gone through its first ferment. I used three black teabags and two matcha green teabags per half-gallon. To find full directions on how to do your first fermentation of kombucha, please click here.

• One half of a jalapeño, chopped

• One half of a pineapple, core and outer layer removed, and sliced into wedges

• Make sure that every thing that you use to make this drink has been washed thoroughly in very hot water, but without soap and then rinsed thoroughly with vinegar to disinfect.

• Put the jalapeño and the pineapple into the half-gallon mason jar of fermented kombucha. 
• Seal tightly with a mason jar lid.
• Allow to sit at room temperature for 48 hours. You may need to burp your jar once or twice during that time - or you may end up with a kombucha volcano on your hands.  It can overflow with your lovely bubbles you open it or in extreme cases of CO2 containment, the mason jar will actually shatter (It's not yet happened to me, but I've seen lots of Instagram pics of the messes caused by carbonation explosions). Pineapple contains a lot of sugar so the yeast will be eating it up like crazy and producing lots of CO2 as a result, thus the need to burp your jar. It also gives you wonderful bubbles. There is an excellent effervescence to this drink. 

• After 48 hours, it's time to bottle.

• Lineup your chosen bottles and take a funnel and a plastic strainer and place in the top of the first jar. Fill each jar halfway full through the strainer and funnel. Then starting with the last glass jar, fill the jars the rest of the way. This increases your chances of having a even distribution of yeast in each bottle. Otherwise the first bottle that you make will have very little yeast in it, because the yeast sinks to the bottom of the jar, and the last bottle that you fill will have a large amount of yeast because it's getting the dregs of the liquid in the jar.

• Still each jar tightly.

• Label and date each jar. 

• Place in refrigerator until ready to drink.

The jalapeno flavor will become more pronounced, the longer it stays in the fridge.  I don't see this as a bad thing.  I have enjoyed the flavors of each growth of the drink.  If it becomes too hot or intense, you can always add some fermented tea from a continuous brew, if you have one.