MICROBE HUNTERS
GIFT INSTRUCTION


Tea bag

Hello, dear friend!

We are happy that you continue to study the microworld after our program. You have in your hands a kit for growing "Kombucha". But in reality this is not a mushroom, but a complex community of microorganisms: yeast and bacteria. They live together in the form of a thick film. Yeast turns sugar into alcohol, and bacteria turns alcohol into vinegar. As a result, everyone is well, such mutual assistance is called symbiosis. When you feed it with sugar, the yeast from the community makes alcohol out of sugar, from which acetic acid bacteria then make vinegar.

Safety precautions:

  • (Read this text with an adult from your home)

    There are no hazardous substances in your kit, but you cannot taste them. As a result of your experiment, you will get overgrown Kombucha and a solution containing the products of its vital activity. Kombucha and the solution under it is also not worth trying.

    Be careful when brewing tea, you can easily burn yourself with hot water. If you are not sure of your abilities - ask adults to do this.

Kombucha cultivation

In your set:

  1. Jar of sugar
  2. Jar of leaf tea
  3. Kombucha sample
  4. Gauze / cheesecloth
  5. Kettle with hot water (need to find at home)
  6. Mug to make tea (need to find at home)

Instruction:

  • 1
    Open a jar with a sample of tea mushroom, cover it with gauze on top.
  • 2
    In a week you will see that a dense mucous membrane has formed on the surface of the liquid - this is still a small community of microorganisms.
  • 3
    It is necessary to feed it. To do this, add sugar tea to the jar. Boil water, pour all the tea from the bottle (there is about one tablespoon of tea there) into a mug, dilute to the state of ordinary tea (be careful not to burn yourself!), Pour the whole bottle with sugar into the tea (it contains about one tablespoon of sugar). Let the tea cool to room temperature. Tea should not be hot!
  • 4
    Remove the cheesecloth from the vial containing the Kombucha. Pour tea into it. If suddenly at this moment the "mushroom" turns over, then it needs to be turned back.
  • 5
    We put only one serving of Kombucha tea for you. In order to continue to grow mushrooms, use black tea and sugar that you have at home. Add 1 tablespoon of sugar to one cup of black tea. You need to change tea as soon as you notice that the tea has become cloudy and a specific smell has appeared. You will notice that the "mushroom" will begin to grow in size and darken.
  • 6
    If you transplant the community into a bigger jar, then it will begin to grow in width, turning from a small mushroom into a tea giant.

Questions and answers

Next science workshop in Barcelona

-, Saturday
scientific workshop for children 5-6, 7-10 and 11-13 years
CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS OF ... FOOD!
We will understand the chemical and physical properties of food, create gummy bears, assemble our own devices for extracting odors, figure it out in food additives and create them in the laboratory, study the physical and chemical properties of familiar products, and even prepare rations for astronauts. Science has never tasted so good!
None of our programs are repeated. The schedule of the nearest programs you can see on the page Calendar ↗. And on the page about us ↗ you can see which programs we have already run.
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