Our kombucha is like no other! We can safely say that because no two scobies are the same. Scobies, as living organisms, are a bit like you and me. They have their own composition, have their own preferences and if they’re more like me, fail to listen to even the most basic instructions.
That means that each scoby produces a slightly different brew and each brewery has its own scobies that grow with their own characteristics. A scoby can be as unique as one of us! Even if breweries swapped scobies, the theory is that the scoby would have to adjust to its new environment and thus the brew would not be the same as one produced at its home brewery.
A bit like taking you to a new and unfamiliar place. You are still you but not fully the ‘you’ someone might recognise as the person bombed out on the couch at home. In a new place, you are more alert, more stressed, more aware of your surroundings even if you don’t recognise yourself as being so. It’s a natural response.
That’s the thing with kombucha – it’s a living culture (provided you don’t kill it by filtering it or pasteurising it!). It’s alive, as alive as you or the trees or the plants. It reacts to its environment, it adapts to it. Too warm and the yeast overmultiply, too cold it starts sleeping. It acts to self preserve, forming the scoby over the surface of the liquid to protect itself. In a raw sense, a scoby is conscious.
So if it’s a living culture and is adaptable to its surroundings, then it should be possible to affect it. Think happy scobies living in a comfortable and loving home versus unappreciated scobies, living in a sterile and unhappy tank. Does one produce better kombucha than the other?
Or even compared to soft drinks, does a happy living kombucha drink do you better than an artificial, chemically created soft drink?
The whole ethos of wellbeing would say that your thoughts, surroundings, interactions and beliefs affect the whole of you. It’s not just the food you eat affects your energy but also your surroundings, how you feel and how you think. If we apply the same logic to kombucha, then its not just the physical growth that should concern us but that the kombucha is living a happy life 🙂
Extending that thought out beyond the confines of the brewery, we are all part of how others feel and live. If we live in a state of aggression it is very difficult for those near us not to feel or be affected by that aggression.
So if a bottle of Holo, a living culture, can be sent out into the world with happy booch inside, does that affect the people who drink it? Like a wave rippling out, are we all part of a living culture, each affecting the next? What if everything we touch, think or affect experiences our love or happiness and it too passes that energy onto the next thing it interacts with? Like a wave rippling out the energy is transferred along the water and each time it meets a similar wave, they become stronger. So spread some love today. Just like Holo 🙂