My SCOBY And Me: A Love Story
There is very little magic to making kombucha.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. Take a SCOBY and a clean glass jar. Feed it diabetic amounts of sugar and strongly brewed black tea. And that is all there is to it. In return, the SCOBY will churn out kombucha like a caffeinated college freshman the day before a final exam. My SCOBY is a magnificent beast. It’s slimy — with protruding grapevine veins, alternating between the color of churned cream and varnished oak. To the touch, it feels like squishy Play-doh. But the smell, the smell is cathartic and intoxicating — warm bread, stale beer, and just a little bit like a husky lumberjack after a long day of lumbering.
The thing about this year is that it feels both I and the world around me are at a standstill. Graduations, weddings, vacations — so many life events that mark the passage of time are cancelled and I just feel like I am in limbo. Days in pajamas have blurred into weeks in pajamas. One of the few things that have kept me happy is my SCOBY, happily farting out kombucha and living its best life of being a translucent symbiotic glob of bacteria and yeast.
Keeping my SCOBY alive has been one of the biggest indications that things are still okay.
I give her sugar when she get too sour. I feed her black tea when her water levels are low. And in return, the SCOBY happily burps out yeast, gets bigger with each passing day, and gives back in effervescent kombucha.
It’s like a sourdough starter, but without all of the waste. It makes the corner of my apartment kitchen smell like a potions cabinet. My SCOBY grows faster when it is warm, slower when it is cold. Like an parasite, it swallows up the competition. I put a culture of coconut yogurt on the shelf next to it, and the next day the yogurt smelled like yeasted bread. The kombucha in the air had taken over. The yogurt never stood a chance.
As a Millenial, I consider merely keeping a houseplant alive a notable achievement.
The SCOBY is my burden of Atlas, my barometer for sanity, my daily sanity check. I have managed to commit accidental plantslaughter to almost every herb, flower, and bush that has been in my house since quarantine. The SCOBY refuses to die, it is resilient. It dares me to stop feeding it, to turn into vinegar, and eventually consume itself. It knows I dare not stop feeding it. Because to stop feeding the SCOBY is to stop feeding the dream that things will keep moving forward, that it’s worth it to eat healthy and nourish the body because a time will come soon when we will emerge outside again. Some days will be more acidic, some more sweet, some even more gassy than others (what? I’m being realistic). But while my SCOBY is part of my life, we will keep each other sane. Because after all what is sanity if not a healthy helping of sugar and black tea?
