I brought a few million friends back to Sweden. No I’am not talking about immigrants.

They were all in my suitcase and as you might have figured out by now they're not human. I’m talking about SCOBY which is an acronym for Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria and Yeast. It’s what's alive in kombucha tea. 

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What is kombucha? 

It’s a fermented tea you can make at home and It has been consumed for thousands of years. It supposedly has several health benefits and has been called the “Immortal Health Elixir” and “The Tea of Immortality”. It contains antioxidants, vitamins, organic acids (that bind to toxins and help remove them from the body) and probiotics. 

Why should you drink kombucha?  

Well the main reason I drink it is because it contains probiotics. I think it is good for us to consume and since the inventions of refrigerators, freezers, canned foods and so on replacing traditional ways of storing food like fermentation most people don’t consume that much or any probiotics. Also taking antibiotics wipe out the good guys as well as the bacteria causing us trouble. Yeast do not die from antibiotics and they can grow in numbers as the bacteria get diminished since they compete with bacteria for food and space, this can cause problems. Candida is a yeast that a lot of people have an overgrowth of. 

But kombucha contains yeast, isn't that a problem? Well it contains different yeast, beneficial ones as far as I understand. It does not contain candida.  

How is kombucha made? 

Kombucha tea is made by mixing tea (usually black tea) and some food for the microbes to eat (usually sugar) with some finished kombucha tea and the microbial cellulose (usually referred to as the SCOBY-mother). The microbial cellulose is the somewhat scary looking thing floating in the jar. It’s produced by the microbes where the liquid meets the air. The microbes live both in the kombucha tea and the microbial cellulose. 

When you make a new batch of booch (another word for kombucha tea) you get a new microbial cellulose (usually called a baby-SCOBY). You can give the baby-SCOBY to a friend along with some booch to get them started with their own kombucha brewing.       

After mixing the ingredients you cover the glass jar with a coffee filter or a cheesecloth. It’s important to let the sweet tea cool down before you add the booch and the microbial cellulose (SCOBY), you don’t want to kill your little friends. Put the jar in a dark place and room temperature, wait for 7-10 days. Then you have a new batch of booch and a new baby-SCOBY. You can also make a second fermentation in a bottle with blueberries or some other thing you like the taste of. Carbon Dioxide is produced in the fermentation process so you can get a fuzzy drink by putting the cap on the bottle. Don’t forget to burp the bottles or your kombucha might explode from the pressure. During the second fermentation you don’t put a SCOBY (meaning the microbial cellulose in the bottle).    

The flying SCOBY 

I got my first SCOBY from my friend @kennyskitchen this is what it looked like. 

He brought it from the US to Acapulco where he held a kombucha workshop at Verde Vegan and gave away SCOBYs to everyone who wanted.

I produced enough booch for personal consumption and drank it daily. Then the time came for me to go back to Sweden and I didn’t want to stop drinking kombucha so I packed a jar with a SCOBY and a bottle of booch in my checked luggage and unpacked it in Sweden. It had leaked a little inside the plastic jar I used to protect the glass jar despite double zip bags. But there was no leakage outside the plastic jar. 

 

 

 

 

I had an old pickle jar that I used to make a new batch and luckily it worked! The SCOBY had survived and it is now flourishing in Sweden. 

If you're in Stockholm and want a baby-SCOBY of your own let me know. :) Let me know in the comments if anything I wrote is incorrect. 

If you enjoyed this check out my introduction post. https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@pomperipossa/lets-spread-some-good-ideas-and-stop-wasting-our-lives