So You Wanna Make Kombucha? Here’s a Recipe!
After our last post on Kombucha, we got a lot more response from our customers than we expected. Seems as though many of you are already devoted converts! Although there are more and more brands of bottled kombucha available on the shelves of your local natural foods store every day, some of you expressed interest in making kombucha at home. Being the helpful sort of folks that we are, we thought you might get some use out of a recipe.
June 29 2008 | Kombucha and Tea Fun | 8 Comments »
Over the years, we’ve seen interest in Kombucha grow remarkably, so we thought to ourselves, “boy, our customers need to hear about this stuff!” Kombucha (occasionally called “kvass” or “Russian mushroom tea”) is a highly sweetened probiotic tea fermented using a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast (or “SCOBY”). This kombucha “mushroom” (also called a “Russian tea mushroom”) is a pale, rubbery zoogleal mat of yeast and acetobacters. The yeast break the sugar’s sucrose into fructose and glucose, then converts the glucose into alcohol. The several species of acetobacter, in turn, convert this alcohol into acetic acid (i.e., vinegar) and gluconic acid. The gluconic acid smoothes the finish of the acetic acid, suppressing much of the vinegar’s harshness. The result is a sweet, tangy, fizzy, lightly caffeinated beverage with almost no alcohol (generally less than .5 percent), and measurable amounts of L-theanine, an amino acid found in all brewed teas and shown to reduce mental and physical stress.
Now that the weather is (finally) turning the corner into spring/summer here in Ann Arbor, it seems only fitting that we start talking about iced tea! Although we’ll be talking more on this subject in the coming weeks and months, I just wanted to give a “heads-up” primarily to our southeastern Michigan customers about a fun mini-class on iced tea that I’ll be teaching this summer at Washtenaw Community College (WCC). The class,which will be held on Thursday, June 12 from 6:00 to 8:00pm, is entitled, “Iced Tea: It’s Come a Long Way Since the St. Louis World’s Fair!” In this short and sweet two-hour class, we’ll be covering: