Hojicha Kombucha

Quite serendipitously, I ate five fermented foods yesterday: yogurt with breakfast, eerily green Japanese pickles and miso with dinner, and a mid-day nosh of the homemade pink kraut. But the finest by far was this home brewed hojicha kombucha. Besides assonance, consonance, and a nice rhyme, it also had fantastic flavor and fizz, that golden (beige?) fleece of the kombucha homebrewer.

To describe the taste of kombucha is to risk insulting it. Vinegar, beer, wine and rot come to mind, and yet the taste is pure and clean. This particular batch has a distinctive, toasty, caramel flavor thanks to the hojicha. I was given a bag of it by a good friend and decided to stretch out the last few portions by feeding it to my kombucha mother. Apparently she liked it as much as I do, and now I'm drinking her delicious babies.