Green tea has nothing on kombucha, a fizzy, fermented elixir with many devotees and supposedly transcendant powers. Molly Young cultures her own “zoogleal mat” and sips at her own risk …
Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE
Type “kombucha tea” into Google and you’ll learn all sorts of things. How-to tutorials mix with glowing testimonials: the drink allegedly cures diabetes, asthma, arthritis, menstrual cramps, constipation and cancer. It also enables better skin, weight loss and thicker hair. Some say it’s mentioned in the Bible; others claim it’s what helps Tibetan monks live to 100 years old. Lindsay Lohan was spotted clutching a bottle on her way out of rehab.
With minor variations, all kombucha smells tangy and looks like effervescent tea, with strands of culture floating at the bottom of a bottle. The taste is bracing, sour, sweet and fizzy, like something served in goblets and called “elixir” in fairy tales. It is punchier and weirder than any other supermarket beverage, with a strong vinegar element.
Most people find kombucha first repugnant and then compelling, like whiskey. Though some remain repulsed: “If you want an honest account of the flavor,” writes one critic on a beverage-review website, “it had a really bitter prune like flavor that remind me [sic] of the scent of vomit.”
Well, de gustibus non est disputandum. If you expect kombucha to be all play and no work, you won’t like it. But it sure beats wheatgrass.
The history of kombucha is as murky as the liquid. The drink seems to have originated in East Asia and worked its way west, igniting a brief craze in late 19th-century Russia and later winning favour with American hippies. Until recently the tea was strictly a homemade product. The FDA released a statement in 1995 warning that kombucha isn’t officially approved as a medical treatment, adding that home-brewers should be careful to make the recipe under sanitary conditions. (Grandmothers and their therapeutic raspberry jam must abide by the same rules.)
What started as a holistic trend in California morphed into a DIY fad among college kids. “The hipsters were the early adopters,” observes Alice Gregory, a senior at Bard College. “Now everyone drinks it. My first kombucha was like the reawakening of a memory,” she tells me. “You feel like you’ve had it before and you don’t know why.”
It’s true: there’s something familiar buried inside the strangeness of the drink. As with beer, wine, cheese, yogurt, pickles, soy sauce and vinegar, kombucha is produced by a process of fermentation, which allows micro-organisms to act on foods. Kombucha’s rotten tang rings a similar bell. As the drink caught on, it “became a status thing at Bard to buy your kombucha versus make it,” Gregory says.
Consumers can choose from a handful of kombucha brands in a few dozen flavours. Yet it shouldn’t be long before the homemade version sees a resurgence, given its steep price (around $3.99 per bottle; recipients of federal food stamps get around $3 daily). The recipe is simple: a cup or two of sugar, a few quarts of black tea and bacteria from another kombucha sample (a bottle of store-bought stuff does the trick). As the mixture ferments, it forms a gelatinous disc called a “zoogleal mat” (pictured below), which resembles a pancake or a mushroom. This is why the drink is also known as “mushroom tea”, although it bears no relation to fungus.