What Is Kombucha Tea?
No-one would ever have described me as a tea-lover, but that changed the moment I discovered kombucha. It tastes nothing like tea, it’s like drinking a sour Granny Smith apple, with a spicy sweetness that reminds you of a sparkling fizzy cider. It’s just so difficult to pinpoint the taste, as it depends on the added flavours, but you will remember the aroma for days, it is simply divine. The crazy part is, you are drinking tea. The best way to describe it would be a healthy alternative to a fizzy drink.
Where to Get Your Kombucha Fix?
The Kombucha UK movement is growing strong, from health stores to trendy cafes, shelves are stocking kombucha. You can find it online and in many stores, and where once home brewers were engrossed in their beer, now more and more of them are brewing their own kombucha tea. The process is relatively straightforward, you just need tea, sugar, and a kombucha scoby. A scoby or symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast is used during the fermentation process and resembles a rubbery blob of jelly. When added to the sugary tea, the scoby turns the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide, which is what gives your kombucha the fizzy texture and the sweet and sour taste.
Benefits of Kombucha?
- Probiotics – kombucha contains large amounts of bacteria, making it a great source of probiotics. These bacteria can improve your overall health and wellbeing since your intestines love the good bacteria that comes from ingesting probiotics.
- Antioxidants – drinking tea can aid in weight loss and help burn off calories. You can make it from green tea to help blood sugar and cholesterol levels, and you also get the antioxidants that green tea provides.
- Less sugar – the average person consumes a lot of their sugar from fizzy drinks, sports drinks, and sweet tea and coffee. A serving of kombucha contains much less sugar, so you can think of it as a healthy alternative to those sugary drinks.
- Taste – you are only limited by your imagination when it comes to flavouring your kombucha. Ginger is a popular addition for a spicy feel, and strong fruit flavours such as passionfruit, grapefruit, or watermelon, create a sublime experience. But ultimately the different tastes are produced by the choice of tea used.
Is Kombucha Going to Take Over the World?
At the end of the day, we are all different, with different tastes and desires. It is hard to describe the experience of drinking kombucha, and the best way to find out about it is to try for yourself. Maybe it’s not the drink for you, but at least you will get to sample a unique drink that is taking the world by storm.
