CHARLOTTE: Kombucha Craze

Anyone who has hung around me for a millisecond knows that I prefer homegrown and handmade to store-bought any day of the week. If I want mayonnaise, I make it. Salad dressing? Watch me emulsify! Chocolate cake? Bowl licking ninja right here.

I coo and whisper to the rows of vegetables in my garden and go to great lengths for food. Ask the Mister about the time I cooked down ten pounds of tomatoes for the teensiest jar of tomato conserva. Who cares that I found it necessary, the day before we were flying out of state, to spend the evening hand-cranking tomatoes through a food mill and then cooking it down for HOURS on multiple baking sheets that never fully recovered from the experience. And, did it matter that the hours of simmering and baking amounted to a mere thimble of tomato-ey goodness? No! That kind of insanity canNOT be bought, bottled or sold at the local grocery.

So, when I spent the week meeting with a handful of hardcore at-home brewers of a fermented tea called kombucha, I felt a little kinship because, you know what? I get it. I love like that.

These people are cut from the same cloth as me. They treat their kitchens like a mystical den of creation, a sacred space where berries are rendered into jewel-toned jars of comfort, where revelations happen over a simmering pot of sauce or, in their case, a fizzy jar of fermented tea. Theses people are loving on their home brews like a mama bear loves her cubs.

Kombucha brewers become quite attached to the lifeblood of their beverage, a gooey pancake called a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast or, SCOBY for short. I snapped a few behind-the-scenes pictures to record the gelatinous pride and joy of these quirky folks.

Read the full story at Creative Loafing Charlotte.

Left to right: SCOBY "hotel" and an aerial view of a growing SCOBY

Left to right: Ken Newbill sharing his famous "Ken-bucha", Brewing a batch, SCOBY gone wild