Kombucha Day

Today's Kombucha Day.

It's also get the stitches out of my head day, go see my trainer day,and read tarot and do some reiki/reflexology for money day.

But most of all, it's Kombucha Day. Today is the day the kombucha is ready, the scoby* is harvested and I have something yummy to drink for the next ten days.

I've had this science experiment running in my kitchen for a few weeks now. A large Ikea Mason jar filled with tea, sugar and this unidentifiable pus-coloured slimy thing floating on the top of the mix. A piece of J-cloth is secured over the aperture of the jar. It sort of smells like vinegar. There is froth forming around the unidentifiable pus-coloured slimy thing.

Every  nine days I make 6 cups of strong black tea, transfer the liquid in the mason jar into bottles, straining and decanting as I go. Then once the tea has cooled, the unidentifiable pus-coloured slimy thing in placed in the tea in the jar, the j-cloth is placed back over this and the car and secured with a rubber band.

The scoby replicates itself over the ten days it's brewing. It's all a bit Little Shop of Horrors meets The Thing from the Black Lagoon meets that stuff you played with as a kid. I have named my scoby, Scooby. Because I can (and I'm going a little bit nuts on this sabbatical, but only a little nuts. It's the nuts which has also got me going to spin classes and having a kanban** board in my hallway so I can keep track of what I get done each day - see, just a little bit nuts)

This is how you make kombucha.

Above is Scooby, and Scooby Junior.

This is a strange thing. I watch the kombucha brewing. I look for the tell tale bubbles over the nine to ten days that it brews. It makes the kitchen smell a little of vinegar.

But it tastes good, I drink it half/half with soda water and I've got a sense of pride that I'm doing this. I drink a lot of kombucha anyway. It's lower in sugar than soft drink, much better for your gut and it looks like you're drinking beer when you drink it.

Also, kombucha is normally $4 a bottle. This costs me the price of six tea bags and to thirds a cup of sugar.

Result, right?

Yeah, it's gross. But good gross.

And it beats talking about politics at the moment.

Brewing kombucha makes me happy. Maybe I'll try kimchi next.


* Scoby is an acronym for symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast.  Seriously, they're freaky.
**Kanban boards are used on projects to keep track of where things are when you're using Agile methodologies. See, I think I'm preparing my mind to go back to work.

Today's Song: