My First Kombucha SCOBY Discovery
Note: this is the intro of a book that I’m developing focused around using SCOBYs to make food, fashion, and art… stay tuned.
The bright green building caught my eye immediately. I must’ve looked like a cat as my curiosity pulled me across the street, following the thread between traffic jammed bumpers on Highway 1 just so I could check out the new food market co-op opening just north of Santa Cruz.
I stumbled upon kombucha as a kid. The hippies that worked in the shop introduced the drink as the Elixir of Life–a mystical brew that has the power to aid in digestion, improve skin complexion, and even fight off cancer cells (though this claim is still inconclusive). What really drew me to this drink is just how underground and grassroots it actually is. This group of food culturalists brewed kombucha themselves in the shop; people in local co-ops were bottling their own several years before it was readily available on the shelves at most health-food markets in 2008.
People filtered into the shop holding massive 1 or 2-gallon transparent globes. After handing these glass jars over the counter, the employees held them under an even larger golden jar of kombucha. An employee unscrewed the bottle’s nozzle. It hissed and stopped with a staccato “POP.” The kombucha rushed out, splashing into the globes like liquid sunshine. A pungent sour scent filled the store and a couple customers’ heads turned (kombucha refuses to be ignored).
There’s a certain alchemy when it comes to the world of fermentation. The drink is alive–teeming with bacteria and yeast. You might know them now as probiotics. All the glassware, tubes, spoons, measuring cups, and scales… it was reminiscent of Victorian Era chemistry labs and I was in awe.
Some employees were in the back washing other glass vessels, disinfecting, and preparing them as new homes for another generation of kombucha microbes. The few times that I walked into the shop, I always saw at least two employees carrying out a duplicative and iterative fermentation process in order to keep the kombucha fermentation going and healthy. It takes a village.
At the top of the brews was something peculiar–a floating thin white halo was forming. It’s a gelatinous, slightly squishy and strangely structural bacterial byproduct of the fermentation process. Give kombucha time to ferment and the bacteria build a biofilm that stretches over the kombucha surface, creating a protective barrier from the oxygenated outside world.
“That’s a SCOBY,” one of the employees yelled from the back over a shrieking faucet, noticing me nervously eyeing the hanging yeast strands in the jar.
“–’stands for symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast. The bacteria bind together to create one big gelatinous… uh well, thing.”
The “SCOBY”, as it’s commonly referred, is a material produced out of a symbiotic relationship between the bacteria and yeast during fermentation. The floating mass has acquired many aliases–Mother, SCOBY, mushroom, fungus, biofilm, pellicle, and the list goes on.
The kombucha was fermenting on a pedestal in massive glass vessels, bubbling like a fresh witch’s brew. It was magical the way everything in the shop was quiet–time stood still and yet the brew seemed to be swirling, loud with excitement. But just like vague figures in a crystal ball, globs of yeast would eagerly drift closer to the glass. They’d hit the side and, looking defeated, would retract back into the opaque golden abyss and collapse into the dusty yeast bed once again.
To learn more about what Malik is doing with SCOBYs, click here.
