Storing raw stock
Updated
Inputs with three different clocks, and usually kept in the same room.
Three storage problems
Perishable wet material, dry material, and living material. Each fails differently.
Fruit and juice
The shortest clock and the biggest microbial input.
Fruit arrives with a surface load, and washing reduces rather than removes it. Damaged fruit carries far more, and one bad piece can raise the load of a whole batch.
Cold, and used quickly. Frozen fruit is a legitimate answer with better consistency and no seasonality, and it costs you a claim about fresh.
Bought juice and concentrate keep far better and bring their own questions: whether they are pasteurized, and what that means for your own process.
Tea, botanicals and dry goods
Stable for months in sealed, dry, dark storage, and they pick up odor readily.
Tea in particular absorbs whatever is near it, so it does not live next to spices or fragrance.
Dry botanicals carry a microbial load and an insect risk, and both matter more in an unpasteurized drink than in a cooked food.
Sugar keeps indefinitely and cakes if it gets damp.
Cultures
The one that is alive and the one with no shelf life in the usual sense.
A kombucha culture is maintained rather than stored: fed, kept at temperature, and monitored.
Keep a backup, in a separate place, fed on a different schedule. A single culture is a single point of failure for the whole business, and they do die.
And record its history, because a culture that has been through a temperature excursion or a contamination behaves differently afterwards, and the batch it makes will show it before you know why.