Skip to main content

Home Brew 3

I have another story to add to the continuing saga of brewing kombucha at home. It's a much shorter story, but it's still a fun one. This time around, the flavor and carbonation of the kombucha come into play. This is not a repeat of the kombucha geyser story, I promise.

I should probably mention that we're on our fifth or sixth batch of kombucha at this point, so the home brewing is definitely going full force. By that point in our brewing, though, we've more or less gotten comfortable with the process. To me, that means that seems like a good time to start experimenting and tinkering. Sure, I could keep making the exact same thing over and over again, but it's fun to try new flavors, new teas, or new sources of secondary fermentation. Basically, you never quite know if there's some new process that will make things taste that much better, so it's worth the tinkering.

In this case, the Mild Wife and I decided to make our own ginger tea. I don't mean that we bought a different brand of ginger tea, I mean that we grated a bunch of ginger and steeped it in hot water. I should mention that the Mild Wife really wanted the ginger flavor to come through, so we made it particularly ginger-y. Now, that was different than our usual process where we just steeped some tea leaves or tea bags, but tea is tea. We had to strain it in order to reduce it down to the liquid, but after that, the rest of the process worked as usual.

Now, I mention all of this so that you know that the ginger flavor of the kombucha was particularly strong. If you've ever heard someone describe a ginger dish as "spicy," you know what I'm talking about. So even though we didn't actually test the kombucha before we served it, we knew it was going to be spicy.

As luck had it, I took a breath in right before I took my first sip of this ginger tea kombucha. Remember, this was a spicy drink, so inhaling gave me a big whiff of the flavor. So, I coughed. You know how someone trying an adult beverage for the first time tends to cough a little bit because it's something of an acquired taste? It looked a little bit like that. This fact was not lost on the Mild Wife, so she had a good laugh about the process. Of course, she handled the spicy ginger kombucha just fine, so it was doubly funny.

Fast forward a couple of brews, and the bubbles from the carbonation made my nose twitch a bit as I took a drink from a glass. It wasn't the first bottle from that batch, so it had nothing to do with a surprise or being unaware of the flavor. I'm not even sure I can explain what caused it, other than I think the carbonation and my nose did not get along for a second or so. Given what had happened with the ginger tea, the cough elicited another laugh from the Mild Wife, and a running gag was born: the Kombucha Cough.

I'm not sure when the next time the Kombucha Cough will appear, but I'm almost certain it will. Apparently, even drinking the kombucha can lead to a few chuckles.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pink

Way back in high school, there was a male teacher that all the girls thought was attractive. It was an open secret that a bunch of them had crushes on him. In fact, the school newspaper even did an article about him that quoted some girl saying, "he's so cute, he even makes pink look good." Yes, he had worn a pink shirt to school one day, and it had apparently been a big hit. I was reminded of this story when my sister-in-law suggested that she would choose pink as the color for her wedding and bridal party. I don't think I've ever made a color look good before, but I remember thinking, "well, I know it's possible to not look stupid in pink as a straight guy, I guess I can try." And I think that's almost exactly what I told her. I also happened to own a gray suit, so I figured the combination would look all right. However, I was pretty much the only one willing to play along. My sister-in-law's brothers wanted absolutely no part of th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dreams

Normally, I don't eat very many sweets. I tend to eat pretty generous portions, but I generally prefer savory food over sweet. In fact, I usually prefer things half as sweet when possible. My preference doesn't have anything to do with health reasons, it's just one of those things that I've always liked better. That said, I do inevitably eat dessert, particularly if I'm out with other people. My stance towards dessert is roughly equivalent to those who are social drinkers . If other people want to munch on something for dessert, I'm not about to cross my arms and refuse. That'd be just a tad gauche. So, I do eat some dessert. I even have a few standby favorites that I'll usually order when presented with them (brownies, creme brulee, and apple pie). But left to my own devices, I'm not about to go hunting for dessert. Apparently, this means that the sugar can really mess with my system under the right circumstances. As I've discovered, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

New York City Trip (Day 1)

After my crappy flight , I was now in Newark, New Jersey at 7AM on a Friday morning. I had done a little bit of reading up, so I knew which bus I needed to take and where I was going to get off. All in all, getting into the city was surprisingly easy. I suppose speaking the language does make things simpler. Through no real planning of mine (a theme of the trip, at least on my part), I picked one of the later bus stops at which to get off, Grand Central. I actually just figured that getting off at Grand Central would give me options, and heck, it's called Grand Central. That just screamed "decent place to disembark that might be close to some stuff" to me, so that's where I got off. However, it also meant that we drove down 42 nd St to get to my bus stop. That just happens to be a big street, and it gave me a glimpse of Times Square as we drove by. My bus stop choice had accidentally given me a rough layout of the city. Go me. I had about 6 hours to kill...
1 comment
Read more