During her chemo last Spring she couldn't drink wine, so we started drinking kombucha instead. Kombucha is a fermented tea drink made by combining tea, sugar, water and yeast with a SCOBY (Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast) and allowing it to ferment.
I had never heard of it before, but once we had, we started seeing it in all the grocery stores and even on some restaurant menus. We tried a number of different flavors and liked most of them. We even found a place not far from where we live that brews the stuff.
It seemed like a natural step to try brewing our own, so Cindy took a short class a couple of weekends ago at the Living Tea Brewing Company, then we started our culture. It's been fermenting away in the closet under the stairs for about ten days, so this morning we took the jars out, removed the SCOBYs, added some flavoring to each one and decanted the liquid into bottles.
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| Cindy's Sour Cherry Kombucha |
Cindy used a green tea base to brew her version; she loves sour cherry juice, so that's what she added to flavor hers.
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| My Coconut Lime Kombucha |
My favorite flavor of the commercial varieties we've tried is a coconut lime version, so that's what I added to mine. I started with a coconut flavored white tea, and thought the stuff tasted pretty good without any additional flavoring, but I had already started juicing the limes, so I added about half a cup of lime juice and half a cup of coconut juice to it.
Then we bottled both versions and put them back under the stairs to continue fermenting.
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| Still Fermenting |
We'll let them develop some effervescence for a few days, and then see what we've got.
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