BOOCH!

On a recent trip to Austin I was lucky enough to stop in at the raw restaurant "Beets Cafe" on 5th street where I was treated to a lovely kale salad, an "ELT" (smoked/dehydrated eggplant, lettuce and tomato) which I plan to recreate myself in the near future, and a raw brownie.

With all this deliciousness, the pièce de résistance for me was the locally-brewed Kombucha Buddha's Brew. I must have drank four of these in the two days I was in Austin. This was the first Kombucha I had tried and really enjoyed outside of GT's. The original flavor was sweet and tart and fizzy and everything that GT's original wants to be.

Tasting something so good gave me enough hope to push my desire to brew my own Kombucha into action. As soon as I got home, I began researching and found that it is actually quite easy to make your own 'boocha at home. All you  need is sugar, tea, and a mother Kombucha mushroom. Now to get your own mother, you have to either know someone who has one or order one online for a good chunk of change (average is about $40.) So I searched around some more and found some more info.



Like I always say, if you can't trust two hipster dudes, who can you trust? So I decided to give it a try. I put all the ingredients together in a gallon jar, and waited. The SCOBY (Symbiotic Collection of Bacteria and Yeast) seemed to be floating and moving around, but nothing much happened for the first few days. I'm sure this is typical, and I would have kept my experiment going, only my good friend heard I was making my own booch and offered to give me her mother. Oh mamma! I came home to find this on my porch one night:

This mother had a ton of strands and a grown baby booch mushroom already grown out of it, so I decided to start from scratch. I now have two batches going: one from the mother and 1 from the baby. Here they are at day 2:

The mother is on the left, the baby on the right. After two days, I already started to see the white 'looks-like-mold-but-it's-not' spots forming around the baby. If you actually do see mold, you have to throw the SCOBY out, but if it is bubbly, brown or doing any other strange thing, it is fine so long as there is no furry mold accumulating.

I plan to let my babies ferment for another week before I bottle 'em up and start a new batch. Now I just need to decide what flavors to add! If you're interested in brewing your own booch, I recommend the following web sites:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8rocz_how-to-make-your-own-kombucha-part_school

http://www.foodrenegade.com/how-to-brew-kombucha-double-fermentation-method/