Kombucha Tea: Soda Pop for Hipsters

The Kombucha Display at the local Whole Foods, so many wonderful flavors, I love Guava!

A number of years back in my freelance yoga training I began to see the magically marketed GT Dave's Kombucha bottles in the hands of glowing yogis.  I began to treat myself at the local food co-op after classes taught in OB...and soon at Whole Foods...Sprouts....and now even at Von's, corner stores in San Francisco, at the Ashram gift shop.  You can learn about Kombucha on the internet, but basically it is similar to yogurt in that you have a starter liquid, milk in the case of yogurt and tea in the case of kombucha.  You add to this starter liquid some finished product, yogurt into the milk cultured with probiotic organisms, brewed kombucha tea with mushroom skoby into fresh tea.  Then there is a waiting period, over night for yogurt, 5-15 days for kombucha.  You reserve some of the finished product to begin a new batch, an on-going cycle in the kitchen.  Now what is the mushroom skoby?  It is a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast that forms a gelatinous patty that resembles a mushroom.  When added to sweetened tea and fermented the resulting liquid contains vinegar, B vitamins, other chemical compounds and a small amount of alcohol, making the drink effervescence.  Many other compounds are produced in this process such as organic acids, active enzymes, amino acids, and polyphenols.  Finished kombucha may contain any of the following components:
Acetic Acid
Butyric Acid
B-Vitamins
Ethanol
Gluconic Acid
Lactic Acid
Malic Acid
Oxalic Acid
Usnic Acid

It's pretty mixed news as to whether this stuff is good for you or not as you can read in this article from the NY Times.  It's the latte for Generation Namaste of which I am a reluctant card carrying  member, and I'm hooked.  But it's not cheap, sometimes I'll be lucky and find 2 for $5, but typically it's priced about $3.50, and with recent scandals over alcohol content, it just doesn't have the fizz and buzz of a few years back.  This change in formula and high price has cause my consumption to decline recently.  So in the theme of my life lately, making things from scratch, I have been contemplating brewing my own.  On Etsy you can easily find the skoby, or mother mushroom, used to brew this probiotic tea.  I choose a seller that listed the product as organic and that included educational support and great return policy if you have problems.  It came today and I'll post my results of my first batch as I proceed through he process.

A more oficial photo from the G.T. webpage.