SCOBY-Doo

I may not be mother to mortal children, but I seem to have a knack for breeding SCOBYs.

How hard can it be to breed spludges of yeast and bacteria, you ask? Not very, I admit. And the more batches of kombucha I brew, the easier it gets. I’m presently fermenting my nth batch (truly, I’ve lost count), and the mass I received from my older sister at Christmas never dreamed he’d have to work so hard.

I was a nervous novice and emailed my sister in a mild panic after three days: He’s just lying at the bottom of the jar. Is he okay??? She wrote back, They do that sometimes. I’m sure he’s fine. And on the fifth day, he rose. I checked the jar in the morning and he had floated onto one side, almost as if trying to himself over and getting stuck halfway. Okay, at least he’s alive. And when I peeled back the cheesecloth to test the brew on day seven, the mouth of the jar was sealed by a white film disconcertingly reminiscent of the white of an eye. Doo was floating just beneath it. In fact, he was tethered to it like the mothership spooling line to a satellite. Yuk.

It’s not unusual, apparently, for baby SCOBYs to develop in the same jar.

Batch number two proceeded the same way. This time I was hoping for a baby, because my tea buddy Treena wanted to try brewing her own kombucha, but if there was a baby, it was glommed to the original when bottling time arrived and I wound up (okay, Ter wound up) carving off a chunk of the whole thing. That batch was made with black tea, so the SCOBY looked like he’d been to a tanning salon. Double yuk.

A few brews later, another buddy expressed an interest in obtaining a baby. I had a batch planned for the weekend and promised her any offspring. From the get-go, SCOBY-Doo stayed near the top of the jar, but in the end proved as fertile as ever, producing a sturdy white sclera. To ensure that it was up to the task, I gave Doo a rest and plunked the babe into a fresh batch of sugared green tea.

It sank to the bottom of the jar and stayed there for twelve full days.

Peeling back the cheesecloth on day fourteen, I was puzzled by the papery thin film that greeted me. “Wasn’t it thicker than this?” I asked Ter, who has SCOBY-handling duty and is responsible for bathing and trimming the Doo between batches.

“I think it’s actually at the bottom,” she replied.

“You mean it never moved?” I peered through the glass at the fog I had perceived as just that: the milky fog that sometimes sinks like sediment on the floor of the jar. Remaining unconvinced, I strained the tea and Ter was proven right: baby-Doo had never left the floor!

The next day I told my friend the story and added, “Your SCOBY is a lazy bum.”

She was ecstatic. “You mean he made a baby to do the work? That’s my kind of SCOBY!”

For the record, she has a child.