I have had some trouble when i travel and the scoby is left alone a while - mostly in winter it gets too cold and can “die” which happened to me at the holidays this year. If you leave the scoby in a small amount of the kombucha tea at warm-ish room temp it’s fine a month alone.
My method differs from noma method- i make a big batch of “basic” kombucha first, just the tea/sugar/scoby mix to ferment. Then i introduce flavor when bottling for second ferment, so i could make 12 different flavor bottles if i wanted. I haven’t tried to introduce flavor at the first ferment, just not how i learned to make it- and i think also that scoby is limited in the future since it will absorb that flavor? I am tempted to make the apple kombucha recipe, may try that with some of excess scoby i have since now mine is healthy and reproducing a lot
