Gin-Flavoured Kombucha

Last night in the #teamaustralia discord channel on PAL, we somehow entered a brief discussion about kombucha, and I mentioned to @choogirl that I had made a Gin-flavoured Kombucha.

So here is how I did it.

The title is a little misleading - as the kombucha doesn't actually taste like Gin.

So there is a way to make your own Gin, and that is by buying a bottle of Vodka, and then steeping juniper berries and other botanicals in it. After steeping for a coupe of weeks, you strain the solids from the liquid and you are left with gin-flavoured/smelling vodka, basically.

I had just made a batch of this home-made gin, and was also decanting and preparing to make another batch of Kombucha, when I thought, "why don't I make one using the gin botanicals?"

Which I did.

So here is the recipe:

• Gin botanical mix: juniper berries, cinnamon, cardamon (green and black), coriander seeds, fennel seeds
• 4 teabags standard green tea
• 1 cup sugar (I used coconut sugar, but white or raw or demerara are often used)
• 4 cups boiling water
• 1 cup starter liquid (kombucha from previous batch basically)
• the SCOBY

I steeped the tea and the spices in the boiled water for several minutes.

Then I added the sugar, and stirred until completely dissolved.

Then I added the starter liquid, stirred, and then the SCOBY.

Covered the jar with fabric and left to do its thing in my pantry for a week or so.

What I made was a brew that had the flavours and aromatics similar to my home-made gin.

The Benefits of Kombucha

So there is a lot of hoo-ha out there about how this brew will save your life or cure cancer and other such things.

I can't really speak to any of those commentaries. However I can give you my take based on Traditional Chinese Medicine theory.

According to the School of Nurturing the Spleen & Stomach all illnesses stem from digestive system disharmonies, and seeks to address the health of the gut before attempting anything else. In recent times, this idea is gaining traction in modern health practices through the research of gut microbiomes.

Most people have heard of probiotics and prebiotics, and kombucha is just another example of one of these.

Certainly, if there is a depletion of beneficial gut bacteria, then taking these kinds of things will help. However there is a reason your "gut-bugs" disappeared in the first place, and that is essentially due to the fact that the environment they have to live and thrive in (i.e. your gut) has become inhospitable. This is microbiome theory.

So if the microbiome in your body is inhospitable to gut bacteria, no amount of supplementation is going to fix the problem, as you are adding critters who are just going to die again. Waste of money, and not fixing the root of the problem.

So kombucha can help with this, as can adjusting your diet to bring your gut back into the appropriate balance for gut bacteria to thrive.

But we can go to extremes with this too, where too much fiddling and supplementation and mucking around with biochemistry (especially without good knowledge of it) can create further problems.

My approach is to make my own kombucha, as the SCOBY is also absorbing and feeding from the bacteria in my own living environment. This helps any bacteria to adapt to my system, and not be shocked by it, which is why I'm not a fan of drinking commercial Kombucha, as I may be introducing something into my system that isn't quite adapted to it. It's also the rationale for cooking my own meals as much as possible.

This could become a whole other post, so perhaps I'll leave it there.

SO that's my Gin-flavoured kombucha..... Cheers!!