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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.

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