Here, Eat These Berries: Kombucha

Raspberry kombucha.

Lots of things are nice to look at as they're being made. Dough, pasta, ice cream, all nice to look at. Even raw oysters can look good after being staged, cropped, filtered and tagged.

Not kombucha. It's the ugly stepsister right up until it's put into a glass with a metal straw and flowering mint. There are 83 reasons making kombucha the wretched little beverage it is, three of which are worth talking about: the SCOBY, the fermentation, and the explosions and shrapnel.

The SCOBY

A SCOBY is a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast (s-c-o-b-y) that looks like a big disc made of algae. Gelatinous algae. A SCOBY can also be referred to as a "mushroom," and little-to-nothing good has ever been synonymous with "mushroom."

A SCOBY. It's a little brown and stringy. You let this live in some tea and then you drink it. Humans!

Fermenting Stage 1

Just like pickles and soy sauce, kombucha gets its unique flavor from the fermentation process. There are two stages of kombucha fermentation. In the first stage, the SCOBY sits in a gallon of sweet tea for 7-10 days, during which time the SCOBY moves around the jar on its own before settling at the top and making a SCOBY baby (a scaby). As the tea ferments, the mixture gets less sweet and more sour.

A note on "scaby": I made this up, it's not a real thing.

A note on "buch": My mom called to tell me that my sister discovered "people in the know" refer to kombucha as "the buch." This also is not a real thing.

Fermenting Stage 2

Once the tea mixture has the right balance of sweet and sour, you take out the SCOBY and scaby and put a bunch of fruit or herbs or both in and wait another couple days for the flavor to be just so. This sounds nice, but it isn't, because the color gets leached out of the fruit which, like the SCOBY, mysteriously moves around the jar by itself.

Happily after the fruit is done fermenting, it gets strained out of the kombucha and is discarded.

Kombucha after fermenting for two days with a box full of crushed raspberries. Color: nice. Bleached raspberry bodies: not so nice.

Sick.

Explosions and Shrapnel

The final reason kombucha is both unfriendly and unattractive is that sometimes it explodes after you bottle it, spraying half a gallon of sugary fruit tea and shards of glass shrapnel all over the kitchen and the cat, whose food bowl you placed directly next to the brewing kombucha.

Strictly speaking, this doesn't have to happen and usually doesn't happen. But it will happen if you let the kombucha ferment in a sealed bottle for too long, since a single bottle can only hold so much carbon dioxide (and this is why kombucha is carbonated! Science.).