My Love for Kombucha

This was published in the final issue of The Wine Zine 08 Summer 2023:

I guess you can say I was an early adopter of kombucha. I was there at ground zero. As a kid in Arizona my mom would often take me to the health food stores. Not the vitamin, GNC-variety but something else—a place that smelled like dirt and gelatin capsules, with poor lighting and scuffed floors that sold hundreds of tiny products with bad graphic design. Like a grey-haired sunned man or woman placed them in the containers individually and applied a label from a home printer. Mom was buying chlorophyll concentrate and colloidal silver, and for my confidence in this errand I’d get a treat which was usually a vegan nut bar or a fizzy canned drink or a medically-branded diet shake. I have my mother to thank for my desultory palate. 

I was transported to these memories not long ago when I tried a new flavor of Bella Hadid’s Kin Euphorics—which our household briefly had a subscription to, because its easier to not drink wine every night when you have a brightly-colored case of sparkly adaptogenic sodas. The new flavor (Kin Bloom) did one of those things I love the most about appreciating food and beverages which is: it took me on a little memory journey. It was weeks before I placed the flavor, but there was a bright green apple thing: tart, a bit bitter, but still bright and fizzy. I remembered a can from the health food stores, small and slim, like a red bull can and with a green flame-like pattern. 

Thanks to r/soda I finally found my flavor memory in the form of Hansen’s Energy. Taurine, ginseng, guarana, ginkgo biloba: these words came flooding back like Nascar sponsors at 200mph. I did a little research to see if I could find this energy drink again and uncovered a very surprising information hole. It doesn’t exist anymore but it is rumored to be a very similar flavor to the original Monster Energy, which Hansen’s launched in 2002 and officially renamed itself in 2012. The purity of this health food world I knew as a kid being weaponized as Monster Energy fulfills a very specific Arizona irony for me. I still haven’t tried it but I’m looking forward to it someday.

When I moved to San Francisco for the first time in 2007 I was doing an internship with Greenpeace, an idealistic cyclist vegetarian. I thought of the Bay Area as the mecca for holistic wellness mysticism and found a giant glass vessel on the sidewalk which I knew I needed to try to brew kombucha with. I went online and found a SCOBY exchange community, met a gorgeous burner who looked like Trinity from the Matrix at a warehouse and took home my SCOBY in a ziplock baggie on my bicycle. I left my big glass jar full of kombucha in the laundry room of my sublet and forgot about it when I moved out :-(

I’ve since tried to brew kombucha at home with limited success, and I have to say I still find it quite a compelling beverage. When I’m trying to drink less wine, it checks all my boxes. In 2020 I took a photo of the large 1.5L bottles of Synergy and had Walmart make a woven throw blanket with the image, a sort of “baby bottle baba emotional support binkie blanket” kind of thought. I love my 1 of 1 GT Dave's kombucha blanket.

When I saw GT’s Chardonnay flavor at a bodega recently I knew I had to buy it, but was unprepared for how brilliant it would be. If you’ve ever had the pleasure to eat a perfectly ripe grape grown for winemaking, that’s where we are but with the acid and fizz and fermentation of kombucha as a base, I felt like a horny honeybee drunk on aromatic pollen. There’s also a bit of oak in there but in the elegant finessed French way I find to be perfect. I’d honestly stop what you’re doing and try to find this before it's gone. 

Ingredients:

GT's Kombucha*, (kombucha culture*, black tea*, green tea*, cane sugar*), chardonnay grape juice*, vanilla extract*, oak, and 100% pure love!!!)