Kombucha Chronicles: Printing, Sealing and Cutting the Label

Designing and putting the labels for the kombucha labels into reality has been an adventure at best. Before when I first attempted a kombucha label we just used the plain paper full page labels with no sort of coating but the ink ran badly with condensation which is literally unavoidable here, so we decided to try clear coating them. John considers most of these labels in the photos in this post failures (so do I), they'll be just fine for close friends.

We're making the transition to bottles that don't need a deposit with regular beer bottle tops and I assumed the bottles we were planning on starting with are 500 ml, which they aren't. So in reality for most things these are a failure, youll see in the next post.

But the design is good and it looks better with a clear coat so long as you don't make it too thick like I did.

This one had random white lines which haven't occurred again....

The last two pictures look the way they do because I WAY overdid it on the clear coat.

It took longer to dry and wasted clear coat, not to mention the weird defects from the heavy layer but they're pretty, a good start in my opinion.

I cut them with scissors by hand, so lots of uneven edges. There was also a bit of a fiasco as far as linux printer drivers were concerned that John needed to sort out, but now I can print from my computer where I couldn't before.

Stay tuned, I've got photos of the first labeling and bottling in which we realized it was not the right size.