An acquaintance some time ago took me up on my offer of a kombucha mother. They accumulate in my fridge and I had sent a call out. I gave him the mother with all the instructions and he said he would take care of it. A week later I met him and asked about his …
Category Archives: ferment
A Study in Contrasts with Kombucha
On this rainy day, reading Thompson’s Growth and Form (“Nature works true to scale, and everything has its proper size accordingly”) while  listening to Beethoven’s Seventh, second movement (Allegretto) over and over again and sipping sumptuous kombucha tea (I’m getting the hang of it). All three are sumptuous, of course, but one is cerebral, the other mournful, …
Living Foods
August is all about food. All the colors are coming in now: deep green collards and brussels sprout leaves, yellow squashes, red tomatoes, orange peaches, purple eggplants, and blueberries are holding in there. The bees are turning the orange and yellow nectar (over)flow into oodles of honey. At the end of the month there will …
Of Axes and Goats and Sumac
The purple loosestrife and the goldenrod are blooming (*), and the sumac is on fire (**). Life is good. I’m researching axes. I am sorely lacking in axe skills, which I think are the perfect skills to have: good for fitness through meaningful physical work, good for the mind as an exercise in mindfulness and …
More Kombucha Adventures
The kombucha SCOBY started as a quarter coin (the mother) in a store-bought bottle. I put it in a pint jar with Indian Chai, where it grew a second layer (SCOBY baby) on top which soon occupied the entire surface. Then I moved it again to a large cookie jar, where a third layer (SCOBY …
Kombucha Taking Off
Literally taking off. By monopolizing the entire surface of the liquid, the SCOBY created an air-tight seal. The yeasts underneath kept on going, producing more CO2 than could stay dissolved in the ferment, so the gas started to push the SCOBY up. I pushed it down into the liquid, and it will floating on top …
Heat Wave Foods
We’re (hopefully) at the tail end of the second  heat wave of the summer. The house, after accumulating heat over the past days, hit 88 at 3 pm, with 70% humidity. Outside, in the shade, it reached 97F (36C) . But it seems I’ve acclimatized. I wouldn’t say that I was comfortable, but it was …
Ferments: Kombucha and Melomel
The Melomel – mead with raspberries – seemed ready to be bottled. There were no more bubbles coming up through the mess of bleached raspberries on top. The one gallon yielded three bottles, here posing in my darkened desk area (another heat wave is upon us). This is the mash: the color was almost completely …
Kombucha
Here’s another experiment in fermenting fun: kombucha. After several unsuccessful tries to get a kombucha mother (a SCOBY – a symbiotic community of bacteria and yeasts) from friends, and the usual apathy and mistrust when eyeing mothers for sale on the internet (ha), I found myself at the refrigerated case of kombucha and other such …
Raspberry Mead – Melomel
The mead is ready. The bubbles stopped rising, the liquid is clear, and at the bottom of each 1 gallon jug is this: Graveyard of a gazillion dead yeasts DH likes the taste of it and had a whole glass while racking. I like it sweeter, so I racked one jar into a new jar …