Looking to combine the two together during the brewing or fermentation process. I was thinking about adding the fermented kombucha to the beer wort then adding beer yeast to ferment. Not sure if this is the.best way or not but jjust looking for ideas or any first person experences!
I've open fermented wort with a kombucha culture on a few occasions. Results were really tart, agreed that it is probably best to do a mixed fermentation (as Dogfish Head did for Fungus Tea’Mungus), or blend beer and kombucha to taste (as Goose Island does for Fleur). Good luck!
know that the kombucha culture (SCOBY) has a bevvy of organisms (some mix of Sacch, lacto, brett, pedio, aceto...and likely quite a few others) that will behave quite differently under different conditions...ie. normally kombucha is fermented with plenty of ambient air, and acetobacter will eventually metabolize nearly all of the ethanol to acetic acid. however, if kept anaerobic, the acetobacter won't be able to metabolize the ethanol, so the brett and other facultative anaerobes in the scoby will slowly churn away over time and do what they do. kombucha tea starts with a relatively low amount of fermenting sugars, given the flavor thresholds of acetic acid. so, even a lower gravity wort would produce a massively acetic 'beer' if left to ferment with access to ambient oxygen. my suggestion would to be split out a couple quarts of wort from the batch to ferment w/ the scoby w/ access to ambient air, and use beer yeast for the remainder. this will create a sort of kombucha 'concentrate' given the likely gravity you're planning. then blend back to taste. probably gives you the best shot to arrive at the beer you have envisioned, and will allow you to dial in the 'kombucha-ness'.
