So it should have come as no surprise to me that I would try and fail (but still give it my all!) as I ventured into the art (craft?) of brewing kombucha, from scratch, at home, instead of in some scientific lab.
I have to admit, I am not a person of science. I majored in English because I loved reading books like Mrs. Dalloway and got my kicks at Penn State not from sorority parties, but spending long nights in the stacks at Paterno Library, perusing ancient compilations of Yeats and dissecting Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" on the hunt for every food reference possible. Save for a school science fair victory once, long ago, science and I are just not besties. Don't get me wrong, I love reading Scientific American and watching PBS programs and going on nature walks. Just don't hand me a beaker and expect me to know what to do with it. It might explode.
So even now, 21 days later, I'm kind of shocked that I took a foray into brewing kombucha. But not that shocked.
You see, kombucha is the shit. For lack of a better word. It really is. I'm not going to try to censor myself here. It's definitely an acquired taste, but once you get over the fact that a tea is fermented, bursting with fizz and tasty like a soda, except HEALTHY, you come to a place of obsession. Or at least I did. Kombucha is chock FULL of probiotics. I first started drinking kombucha some time last year in a desperate attempt to counterract all of the crazy antibiotics I was taking, determined that I could get just as many probiotics from food/drink that I could in a very expensive daily probiotic capsule. Through tons of research and hippie friends regaling me with kombucha stories, I realized I just needed to try it ASAP. One afternoon I ambled to my local neighborhood Safeway in DC and grabbed a few bottles of GTs Raw Kombucha. It was organic. It had tons of probiotics; the same amount if not MORE than those nasty pills. Win. It was delicious. And I got a little tipsy off of it, though sadly I haven't had that reaction to another bottle since.
I started drinking kombucha daily, then realized, at $3 a bottle, this might become an issue. I couldn't get enough of it though. I'd try different brands, every flavor of each new brand. My favorite is still to this day GT's grape chia, a delicious grape-flavored kombucha with not as much of a vinegar taste as the Original or Ginger flavors, loaded with chia seeds (another huge health bonus) that look odd floating all around, suspended in the kombucha bottle, but have an earthy taste.
Which is why, for my 30th birthday last month, all I wanted was a scoby. A scoby is a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast, and before you think I've lost my mind, know this. It's like the starter in sourdough bread. (Which if you haven't made before, WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?) My sister is the type to oblige my weird birthday wishes and ordered a scoby for me on etsy, and when it arrived I was both intrigued and scared. It looked like a certain flattened body part. It was slippery and slimy and I couldn't possibly fathom handling it enough to slip it into a jar. Everything started to feel creepy, like maybe I shouldn't really be making this at home. That maybe I had no business trying something so new and scientific, and how the HELL was the green tea I poured into a gallon jar supposed to sit with a scoby for 21 days and voila, healthy drink-omatic. I became hesitant, so I let the scoby rest in her juices for a few days while reading up on some kombucha blogs.
And then I became obsessed. I suddenly wanted to care for this scoby that would produce a baby scoby in due time. No pun intended. At first I scoffed at those bleeding heart beatniks who named their scobies like they were some kind of pet. And then one day I named mine Joni Mitchell. So who's laughing now.
Joni became my brew. I attended to her every day, painstakingly making sure to read and re-read and dissect each instruction so I couldn't, wouldn't mess up. I scrubbed and sanitized a huge multi-gallon glass jar. I bought cheesecloth. I made sure to use the right kind of green tea, only organic sugar, and stayed up until 5 am one night checking the starter tea, making sure it was cooled down to room temperature before releasing the scoby into the jar. I kept the jar in a cool dark place but not too cool. Warm enough so as to ferment and made a lid cover of cheesecloth, two layers so as to keep out fruit flies.
The first few days were a little boring, with no real scientific action to write home about. Stuff was FOR SURE bubbling under the surface, but nothing quite visible yet. I was looking forward to the part where a new scoby forms. The romantic in me just can appreciate new life, and if I can create it in a jar, well that's kinda cool. Days went by and I forgot about my pet. That's the great thing about kombucha brewing (or so the bloggers say)...you can just dump everything together, cover and walk away and this whole, complex, scientific process occurs without constant attention. That's something I can get down with.
At about the 7th day I could visibly see a new scoby forming as a top layer over the brew, covering the tea underneath. I taste-tested the brew at this point, which was WAY on the sweet yet still vinegary side, so kept letting it ferment. Eventually 2 weeks went by. The new scoby at this point was so thick that I started to dream up just bottling the brew already, however I really don't stick with things and wanted this to be a breakthrough. I let it keep fermenting. I read a lot. Wrote far too little. Started a new job.
Then, magically at day 21, it was ready. Except.
Fruit flies. Hopping around.
Everywhere.
At first I saw one jump from one side of the jar to another. Then realized I had created a breeding ground for insects, and that in fact there were probably millions of baby fruit flies that were about to come to life. I'd read enough about fruit flies to know how they plant their eggs, and I'll be damned if I drink a gallon of fruit fly eggs. I've got enough stuff going on with my bod.
Chagrin isn't the word. I was devastated. I just stared numbly, then stubbornly started straining out fruit flies and bottling my brew. Then of course, once neatly bottled in Mason jars, dumped it all down the sink. But first I made it pretty. In April I would have thrown all of the jars across the room until they shattered, screaming obscenities about the unfairness of life. Things have changed. I can still pull the utmost of juvenile tantrums if you put me on a highway during rush hour, but I like to think the days of unnecessary outbursts are gone.
Which is a breakthrough. In some regard, it was never about the kombucha directly. It was about creating something organically, start to finish. About process and routine. Sticking to a task until carried out. Despite the fruit flies, kombucha WAS created. New life was formed. It might've been a trial by fire, but sometimes that's the point.
