Kombucha ABV Testing
Know Your ABV In One Minute
The Rare Combinations Alcohol Detector gives you accurate, direct ethanol measurements in your kombucha without sending samples to a lab or waiting days for results.
How it works
Air strips the alcohol
The detector pumps air through your kombucha sample, stripping alcohol out of the liquid and into vapor. It's the same principle as a breathalyzer, just applied to liquid instead of breath.
A gas sensor reads the vapor
The alcohol-rich vapor flows over a precision gas sensor that measures ethanol concentration directly. No chemistry, no reagents, no lab equipment.
Your sample, as-is
Because only vapor is measured, what's in the liquid doesn't matter. Floaters, carbonation, yeast, sediment: none of it affects the reading. Sample prep is essentially zero.
Third-Party Validated
In 2020, Kombucha Brewers International contracted Beyers Analytical to independently compare the RC Alcohol Detector to a GC-FID laboratory instrument. GC-FID is the gold standard for alcohol measurement in the industry. The results came back nearly identical across all six samples.
| Sample | GC-FID | RC Detector |
|---|---|---|
| Kombucha 1 | 0.35 +/- 0.01% | 0.32 +/- 0.05% |
| Kombucha 2 | 0.82 +/- 0.01% | 0.76 +/- 0.05% |
| Kombucha 3 | 0.60 +/- 0.01% | 0.54 +/- 0.05% |
| 0.75% Standard | 0.74 +/- 0.01% | 0.77 +/- 0.05% |
"We currently use a local lab that uses gas chromatology. They are a public-school funded lab, so it's affordable, but we still have to deal with freezing and overnighting samples, waiting, etc. and while affordable compared to private labs, is not free. Having an accurate in-house method would be the holy grail for any kombucha brewer…"
GT's Kombucha uses our detector. So do 300+ others.
From garage brewers to GT's Living Foods. Breweries in 42 countries rely on the RC Detector for day-to-day compliance testing.
Built by a brewer, for brewers.
In 2017, Nick Robertson set out to open a kombucha brewery. He ran into the TTB's 0.5% ABV threshold, the federal limit that determines whether a kombucha must be regulated as an alcoholic beverage, and found that the only way to monitor alcohol between formal lab submissions was to wait days for results.
He spent the next year developing a better option. The result was the RC Alcohol Detector, an on-site ethanol testing instrument, made by Rare Combinations LLC, built specifically for kombucha producers who need reliable, same-day readings between lab submissions.
A patent was filed. Over 300 detectors have shipped to breweries in Singapore, Canada, Australia, the UK, Germany, India, Spain, Brazil, and many more.
Ready to test your kombucha?
Ships within two business days. Free worldwide shipping. One-year warranty. Support available via phone, email, or WhatsApp.
* Accuracy of +/- 0.03% applies to measurements in the 0.1% to 0.5% ABV range.