Without ever really realizing it, I’ve had a taste for lacto-fermented beverages since I was a kid. As a child in Austria, my favorite supermarket drink was Lattella, a refreshing beverage that’s made with fruit juice (in the 1980s, passionfruit and mango were the available flavors — exotic tastes of faraway tropical lands that were so far away from Central Europe’s drizzly, grey, take-it-or-leave-it grumbles) and whey, a byproduct of the region’s cheesemaking, using high-quality, rich milk from the Tirol. I couldn’t get enough of its slightly sour, slightly salty, minerally taste.
As a child, I was always thirsty. Sometimes we’d drive along the highway on a hot Austrian country side day — outside, fields of grain waving blonde in the sunshine — and we’d pass a billboard advertising a light pilsner, a “Helles,” and I’d get so thirsty I could barely stand it. All I’d want was that effervescent coolness coursing down my throat. Whence this constant thirst? I’m not sure. Maybe it was because back then, we didn’t all have our individual, kid-sized SIGG bottles to carry everywhere we went. You drank a glass of water before getting in the car; you had a juice halfway at the gas station; you had an Apfelschorle upon arriving at your destination. In between, you stared longingly at the billboards whizzing past.
At that time, I had a fierce taste for adult beverages. I dreamed of sipping red wine out of balloon glasses, of holding up to my lips a heavy stein of frothy Helles. I loved Coca-Cola, but not as much as my father, who drank up to eight cans a day and was famous for flying into an irritable rage if the intervals between Cokes were too drawn-out. On long car trips, my mother always kept two or three emergency cans stashed in the passenger-side footwell. To this day, the expectant sigh of a soda can popping open always reminds me of my dad.
Then we moved away, and there wasn’t any other country in which a soft drink might have whey added to it. Well, Germany had its Müllermilch (Fitness Molke, to be precise) and Switzerland had its Rivella, but neither tasted quite the same.
And then I tasted kombucha for the first time, as a high-schooler in Munich. Marketed under the brand name Carpe Diem as “kombucha soda,” it came in amber-colored, medicinal-looking plastic bottles. Fizzy, sweet, sour and salty, it soon became my favorite drink. (This a good step in the right direction for a girl whose after-school snack was a can of Mezzo Mix and two Prinzen Taler cookies.) It made me feel satisfied; it quenched my thirst; it gave me a kick of energy that even our cappuccino machine in the cafeteria couldn’t.
Fast forward to college in Berkeley, California. I’d moved into my beloved Walnut House (with our original crew of roommates: Mariana and Oren — default house mother and father; Chris; Olivia; and Andreas), and Mari took me down to Santa Cruz to stay at their wonderful, dilapidated old house right on West Cliff Street. It would be torn down a year later to put up mini-condos; after all, it was an $8 million property and you couldn’t have a bunch of hippie gardeners living in there with their raspberry bushes and tumbledown shacks and excess of peace & love when there was real money to be made, right?
Anyway, one of Mari’s friends, another Brazilian girl, had a big pot of kombucha brewing at her house. She offered me a taste: and I fell back in time, first to those high school days nursing my $4 bottle of Carpe Diem, and then even further back, to my four-year-old days in Vienna, begging my mother for a couple cartons of Lattella at the Julius Meinl grocery store. I was hooked. I brought back a “baby” that she’d given me — the kombucha culture made of symbiotic yeast and bacterial cultures, all woven into a floppy frisbee-like disc of rubber — and brewed my own kombucha in our Berkeley kitchen.
We had a great pantry in the Walnut House: adjacent to the kitchen, our state-of-the-art thermal heating system gently warmed behind the pantry shelves. Perfect location for brewing two 2-gallon jugs. I was up to my neck in kombucha! Couldn’t drink it quickly enough, even if I had wineglasses of the stuff every night before dinner. If neglected for too long, it became vinegar. None of my roommates liked it, not even Jean-Baptiste (French) or Sebastian (German). When we moved from California, I had a big kombucha giveaway party at Anthony’s parents’ house: gifting the discs to Anthony’s students, our friends, colleagues. I think there’s still a baby hibernating in a Ziploc bag at the back of my mother-in-law’s fridge.
And now I’m brewing kombucha in Burlington. It’s been a while, and my kitchen temps are cooler than they used to be (probably 50-55 at the back of the cabinet), and I haven’t found my perfect brewing spot yet. Above the radiators: too hot and dry. Cabinets: cold, due to our 1940s uninsulated construction. Hmm. I’ve grown impatient and have begun drinking the kombucha not fully-fermented, still a little sweet, a little astringent from the black tea’s tannins. And I think I brewed the tea too strong. Next time, I’m going to use this recipe (I like how she dilutes a quart of strong, sweet black tea with 3 additional cups of water for the perfect strength of brew and a just-right temperature).
I’ll let you know how it goes!
