I have a sneaking fondness for fermentation processes.\u00a0 In the past I made beer for awhile, though that ended when I realized I couldn’t drink all I made.\u00a0 When a batch came out really well, I could take it to parties and give it as gifts.\u00a0 But when it was only middling — well, it just seemed a waste of time and money to put half of it out as snail bait.\u00a0 But after the first arduous afternoon of lab work, boiling, steeping, and cleaning, the fermentation process — the primary fermentation in the plastic bucket and the secondary in the big glass carboy with the cute little air lock — was a fascinating biological experiment.\u00a0 I liked checking on it, watching the bubbles of carbon dioxide blip through the water in the air lock, and smelling that ancient warm smell of yeast at work.<\/p>\n
For a half dozen years I kept a sourdough starter, which made great pancakes.\u00a0 But then I joined Weightwatchers, and pancakes became a thing of the past,\u00a0 along with the starter.<\/p>\n
Then for a couple of years my partner and I made wine from plums from our tree and our neighbor’s.\u00a0\u00a0 Each time we ended up with about twenty-five bottles of fairly decent wine.\u00a0 But since neither of us drinks that much, and good grape wine is available and cheap, most of them languished in our basement.\u00a0 From time to time we think idly of trying to distill\u00a0 the rest into some form of rotgut slivovitz.<\/p>\n
Now it’s kombucha.\u00a0 Last fall, at a fair put on by a local mycological society, a cheerful young woman was selling samples of kombucha tea and SCOBYs, an acronym for “symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast,” from which kombucha is made.\u00a0 The process is pretty simple:\u00a0 basically, you drop the SCOBY, which looks something like a translucent white hockey puck, into a jar of weak sweet tea, cover it with several layers of cloth to keep out the bad microorganisms, and leave it for a few weeks.\u00a0 What you get is a sour, slightly carbonated drink that is supposed to have mysterious health benefits.\u00a0\u00a0 The lure of fermentation seduced me again, and I bought a couple of SCOBYs and set them up at home in their own jars of tea.\u00a0 Since then I’ve had two jars at a time, at different stages of the fermentation process, and another of mature kombucha in the refrigerator, which I feel constantly pressured to drink up before the next batch is ready.<\/p>\n
The first time I drank a glass, I got a little high; later I found out that kombucha can have a fair amount of alcohol in it, and now I drink less and dilute it with a lot of water.\u00a0 I’ve googled it to find out what its benefits are, and aside from the fact that many generations of Chinese and Russians seem to have felt it was a wonderful tonic and some people make anecdotal claims of its miraculous effects on everything from sexual function to arthritis symptoms, there seems to be little solid evidence that it does much.\u00a0 On the other hand, it’s not unpleasant; I think on a warm summer day a glass of kombucha might be refreshing, with its fizzy tartness and slight alcohol buzz.\u00a0 I’ll see if I can keep it going until then.<\/p>\n
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I have a sneaking fondness for fermentation processes.\u00a0 In the past I made beer for awhile, though that ended when I realized I couldn’t drink all I made.\u00a0 When a batch came out really well, I could take it to … Continue reading