So I was bottling up a batch of kombucha tea this morning and thought it might be nice to have a funnel to make the process a little less messy. Naturally I reached for my beer equipment. I had already been using beer equip for brewing the tea as Star San makes a perfect sanitizer for this culture. After tasting my first batch of tea and delighting in it's tangy goodness, I panicked! Kombucha "mushroom" is actually a pellicle formed by a symboitic culture of Acetobacter, Brettanomyces, and a few other bugs.
So is my plastic funnel ruined for beer making? will boiling it solve the problem, or leave me with a warped and infected funnel? I don't think Star San will work on this. Maybe bleach?
Also, how does Acetobacer work? Does it require oxygen? Because I almost wouldn't mind experimenting with this culture on a finished beer to dry it out and sour it a bit, but I really don't want to wind up with vinegar.