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Kombucha Sugar Calculator

Estimate the sugar for a kombucha brew from batch size and sugar rate.

Result

280.00 g
1.40

How it is calculated

The sugar is a straight multiplication, so it scales in proportion to batch size:

sugar (g) = volume (L) × sugar rate (g/L)

cups = sugar (g) / 200

Volume is in litres and the rate in grams per litre. The cup figure assumes about 200 g of granulated sugar per US cup, a rough conversion that changes with how the sugar is packed. Both results have two decimals. The tool does not choose a rate for you and has no upper limit on it, so the rate is your decision: lower rates leave less food for the culture, higher ones leave a sweeter brew. Volume and rate must be above zero. Use the volume of the sweet tea you are making, not the size of the jar.

Worked example

You are making 4 litres of sweet tea and choose a rate of 70 g per litre.

Sugar = 4 × 70 = 280.00 g.

Cups = 280 / 200 = 1.40 US cups of granulated sugar.

Scaling the same recipe up to 8 litres simply doubles the sugar to 560 g.

Try this example →

Common mistakes

  • Entering the volume in gallons. The field is litres, so a 1-gallon batch is about 3.8, not 1, and 1 would give too little sugar.
  • Entering the rate in grams per cup, per gallon or as a percentage. The field is grams per litre, so a rate of 70 means 70 g in each litre.
  • Counting the whole jar, including the space taken by the starter liquid, as the volume of tea. Use the amount of sweet tea you actually brew.
  • Using the cup figure with powdered, brown or packed sugar. The cup conversion is for granulated sugar at about 200 g per cup, so weigh the sugar for accuracy.
  • Dissolving all the sugar into cold water. Dissolve it in the hot tea first, then cool the sweet tea before adding the SCOBY.

About this calculator

Kombucha fermentation needs a fixed sugar-to-water ratio for the SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) to have enough food to convert into acids and a small amount of alcohol — a commonly used starting point is roughly 50 g of sugar per litre of sweet tea base (about one US cup per gallon), though the exact rate varies with fermentation time, temperature and the tartness you're aiming for, so it scales linearly with batch size rather than staying fixed.

Home kombucha brewers use this calculation whenever they scale a recipe up or down from the batch size it was originally written for — going from a 4-litre jar to a 20-litre batch, for example — since getting the sugar amount wrong either starves the SCOBY culture or leaves the finished brew too sweet and under-fermented.

This calculator takes your batch volume in litres and your chosen sugar rate in grams per litre, and returns the total amount of sugar to dissolve into your sweet tea base, in grams and in US cups (at about 200 g per cup).

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