With language at times invoking mystic energies, chakra alignments, and a laundry list of health complaints to be cured, kombucha has steadily colonized supermarket shelves over the past decade or so. Its makers tout it as a healthy beverage, a supercharged probiotic tea with just the tiniest buzz—a feel-good alternative to a can of soda.
Not being much of a tea drinker, it took me a while to try kombucha. Then again, as a fermentation explorer, how could I not try this suddenly new and popular fermentation? And … it’s good. It’s different. It takes all of my notions of a drink and flips them on their head. The nearest comparison I find in my latent Southerner’s palate is that something must have happened to a glass of sweet tea—and that’s not far off.
Kombucha’s origins are shrouded, as are a great many foodstuffs, in legends and tales without much evidence to back them up. The common origin stories place kombucha’s creation in Manchuria sometime between 200 and 2,000 years ago. My guess: There are uncodified kombucha-esque beverages stringing far back in human history. (Fermentation happens easily. History, on the other hand, takes more effort.).