Fermented Tea???

About a month ago, around the same time I was making the kraut and kimchi, I became intrigued with Kombucha Tea. I headed down to the Nugget Market in El Dorado Hills, which is a remarkable supermarket that stocks raw milk and organic foods in addition to conventional food industry stuff. Sure enough, they had raw Kombucha Tea.

At the time, Miach had some GI thing happening and I suspected he needed some good microflora, so I bought 3 bottles of the Kombucha Tea and made him drink one. I also drank one (not bad...) and the third I saved for the live cultures.

In doing some research, it seems that Mother of Vinegar and Kombucha Mother are pretty much the same mix of organisms that form a leathery, rubbery disk that covers the top of your fermenting juice or tea. This blob is called a SCOBY: Symbiotic Colony Of Bacteria and Yeast. The main bacteria is Acetobacter and the yeast is wild yeast from the environment. Now, I have a real admiration for the wild yeast that live in my geographic area. I have a wild yeast sourdough that is absolute gangbusters. It can be in the back of the 'fridge for months, untouched, and yet you can feed it some flour and water and it will snap into action. It raises bread dough almost as quickly as commercial yeast. In traditional San Francisco sourdough, the tartness of the bread is very important. This is NOT that kind of sourdough. This is more the kind of sourdough that people have been making bread out of for thousands of years, and it produces bread that is indistinguishable from bread made with Fleischmann's Yeast or any other commercial yeast. But it's LOCAL yeast! So, I had a lot of hopefulness that I could end up with a very viable and productive Kombucha SCOBY, if I could just get it started out well.

The directions for making your own Kombucha SCOBY were to mix 1 part Kombucha Tea with 3 parts sweetened tea; put it into a large non-reactive (glass, ceramic or food-grade plastic) container with a large surface to volume area (not a wine bottle, but a canister or bucket) and stir it like crazy getting plenty of air into it, then covering it with a thin, medium-weave fabric to keep out bugs but let in air and yeast. I took it a step further, and figuring since Mother of Vinegar and Kombuch mother were virtually the same thing, I dug around in my cabinet and found my bottle of Bragg's Natural Apple Cider Vinegar with The Mother. Sure enough, a SCOBY had formed on the top. I had to pour the whole bottle into a glass pint measuring cup to get the SCOBY out, because it had a narrow neck. I tore off about half of it, and put the rest and the vinegar back into the bottle. I used a large glass storage canister from IKEA as my fermentation vessel, cleaning it with soap and water first. Then I put the 16 oz bottle of commercial raw Kombucha tea from Nugget into the canister, threw the vinegar SCOBY in there, and brewed up a half-gallon of strong black tea, which I cooled to room temperature and added quite a bit of sugar. Probaby 1/2 to 3/4 cup. It tasted sweet. I added that to my canister, covered it with muslin and tied string around the neck of the canister to keep it in place, tucked it into a dark corner of my counter and tried not to bother it for a few days.

Sure enough, presto, after about 2 weeks a SCOBY had formed on the top of it and I had a sweet/sour kombucha tea. I poured this out of the canister, leaving about a cup or 2 with the SCOBY, and refrigerated it. Then I made another half-gallon of tea, this time sweetening it with honey, and did it again. That tea was much less full-bodied when fermented, so the next time I went back to sugar. Most recently, in preparation for an upcoming surgical event that will limit my ability to tolerate sweets, I fermented the tea for 2 full weeks and have a very tart, only slightly sweet tea now that I'm going to attempt to take after the surgery in very small amounts to see if I can tolerate it.

TMI ALERT!!!!! DO NOT READ IF YOU CAN'T TOLERATE TALK OF BODILY FUNCTIONS.
I'm a gassy person. It's really aggravating and occasionally embarassing. Obviously, one tries to be polite and discrete, but there are times when things are just totally beyond one's ability to stop them, and this situation had gotten worse and worse over the past few years. I'd noticed that when I follow a low-carb diet, it takes care of the problem about 75% of the time, which is going to be the subject of a post-surgical blog post, I'm sure. Well, Kombucha Tea seems to take care of the problem, too, but for it to work most effectively I've found that I need to drink it with most meals. If I do that, no intestinal gas. I don't have to drink much; maybe 2 or 3 ounces. A 16 oz bottle can last me 2 days in the car in winter (it isn't fermenting much in a cold car).
YOU CAN START READING AGAIN, GENTLE ONES.

Other claims that I can't verify (yet) that are attributed to Kombucha Tea:

Due to the composition and metabolic by-products of this microcultured, living food -- which I do not want to go into, as it is beyond my pay grade and kind of boring unless you're a biologist -- Kombucha helps balance your acid/base profile, makes assimilation of B vitamins much better, makes GERD symptoms much better, helps you sleep, improves your skin and hair tone, helps you to digest food, regulates your elimination (both kinds)  and energizes you. Many people who have tried it quickly become proponents of it, and I am certainly one of them. I'm not entirely sure what the Kombucha is doing, but whatever it is, I feel much better when I drink it and my inclination now whenever I have a slight dyspepsia or other digestive problem is to swig some Kombucha tea. I recently had to stop my arthritis medication, which is NOT FUN, but on days that I have somehow missed the Kombucha tea, my arthritis is much worse and on days when I drink it the arthritis pain seems to be tolerable. This is a relatively new observation, and it could be dependant on several other factors like barometric pressure and ambient air temperature, so I'm not quite convinced the Kombucha is a good arthritis reliever yet.