Kombucha is all the rage, but that doesn't mean you can't make it for about 20 cents a gallon either, which is what I found out when I bought a scoby to go at it myself.
My friend Clare told me that some drunk movie star is responsible for them taking the most popular brands it off the shelf at one point, until the took the very slight alcohol out of it. It may have also gained the drink a widespread panic appeal, sort of like the Catholic church, or Boston banning a book (Bingo, and it's an instant best seller).
I'm taking Clare's word for it, because there is no way I'm googling the back story.
But at any rate, what you'll need to make it yourself, in case it's stripped from the shelves is a scoby (a "mushroom" like spongy thick film that is a combination of yeasts and healthy bacteria), which you can buy, dried out and mailed to order.
Of course, I ran a batch of sweetened Oolong tea, with no scoby, right next to the batch I made according to the instructions that came with my dried scoby that I bought. Guess which batch took off and fermented the sugar to yield the lightly carbonated, effervescent elixir, and which did not*? Somehow, naturally, the scoby showed up in the batch with no added commercial scoby.
*After contacting the scoby seller, I was able to get a replacement and more-- they were very nice and interested about the whole episode. But by now, I've done there or four more batches, with the same success.
Now my free, naturally occurring, spontaneous scoby showing up could have something to do with the fact that I had about 30 gallons of wine, which means freely floating, air-born yeast strains were in the room near the open container of sweetened Oolang. Don't know for sure. My in house microbiologist is on sabbatical again.
At any rate, the Kombucha came out great, and when I discovered that fact on returning from a trip, I basically started adding adjuncts for mad flavor. What you see here is the Oolong tea with the spontaneous scoby before having added Tart Cherry juice and Chia seeds.
As you can see in the last photo, Chia seeds tend to sprout a little in the lightly carbonated tea after a little while, giving them a unique, mouth feel, sort of like enlarged and slippery little caraway seeds.
Chia seeds are said to be a so called "Superfood", which contain way more nutrients, pound for pound than just about any other food you can name, cooked or uncooked, from ultra high levels of antioxidants to balancing the blood sugar that most of the other fermented beverages we discuss here tend to unbalance.
I'm not prepared to look that up right now to verify all the claims made about Chia seeds, but suffice to say, beyond the cool look factor, there's a good reason to drop a handful of these Chia seeds in the mix. Adding honey to keep it carbonated works pretty well, as honey doesn't need to be sterilized, as one would any form of fermentable or unfermentable sugar in a beer, or wine. Althought, wiki states that the yeast and bacteria strains that comprise a scoby are not too fussy about sterile environments.
My whole experience with Kombucha has me thinking about combining some of this Kombucha as a flavoring, or even a bottle finish on a future Belgian style, Sasion type sour beer, like that new Belgium Sasion, which I happen to like a lot. You can see it to the left.
A family member used to tell me about pipe line workers in Pennsylvania, who would pour peanuts in their beer and call it lunch. I'm you could do worse than dropping in a few scoops of Chia seeds like they sit in this Kombucha, especially if it really could balance out the sugar shock to the liver one gets with the regular consumption of most beers.
