Did I Break My Sobriety With Kombucha?
Drawing the line around my sobriety.
An Innocuous Sip
Last weekend, I tried a sip of Kombucha.
I had heard of Kombucha and seen it in the juice aisle of the grocery store, but I wasn’t sure what it actually was. The drink surprised me with a delicious fruity taste and an unexpected fizz.
I had another sip, enjoying it even more than the first.
It was only after this second sip that I finally bothered to look at the bottle. What I saw made my stomach drop.
It turned out that Kombucha was a fermented tea, and since it was fermented, it contained naturally occurring alcohol.
I’ve been sober for the past four and a half years. When I read that bottle, my first thought was that I had just thrown it all away.
Fortunately, I recovered from this feeling quickly. Had I broken my sobriety by taking a sip of a drink that I didn’t even know contained alcohol? Of course not. This wasn’t the beginning of a relapse, it was just an inadvertent mistake.
Later that day, I researched Kombucha online and was even further reassured. It turns out that most Kombucha, including the one that I had tried, has less than 0.5% alcohol content. At such a low level of…
