The label was hand painted using “Cerulean” blue watercolor pigment.  The contrast with the gold design makes for an attractive entrance.

The taste is decidedly herbal, heavy in the nose with more pungent spices like star anise and cardamon.  It’s well balanced between sweet and tart, nice and fizzy with mysterious twists and turns through a labyrinth of flavor.  The seduction is in simply trying to figure out just how one is realizing the experience of imbibing.

Its hue is like that of the sunset over Cypress.  My Lebanese ancestors would likely have seen a sky like this over the Mediterranean on a warm summer evening, arid desert winds combining with cool mountain gusts to conjure an ether of amber light more beautiful than any eye had ever borne witness.

Click “NEW” to order a fresh bottle or “REFILL” for a  home-delivered refill in exchange for your empty.

Is it too early to say happy holidays?  Oh dash it all – HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

The most precious print and snack bag makers of all time, Once Upon a Paper, and I met up TWICE so far this season, once at the Astoria Market held at the Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden where we imbibed on Jim Beam and Ruth’s Blend and then again last week at ArtsCetera on Smith St. in Carroll Gardens.  Serendipity? I think so.

Here are their bags:

Here’s is the creator of the cuteness with her equally if not cuter son:

Just like chocolate and peanut butter, we discovered through a cosmic collision between a Mombucha bottle and one of their sturdy, beyond adorable little velcro lunch sacks fit perfectly together.  We got so excited that we’ve dropped the price down on both of our items for a combined gift package of a bag+bottle=$30.  What a great gift, right?  It’s cute AND nutricious or “cutricious!”

Oh, and I’ve got lots of new flavors like that one in the background, Crescent City Koffee.  It’s actually fermented coffee & chicory from the famous Café du Monde in New Orleans.  There’s also Black Vanilla (coconut, pineapple, vanilla in a black tea blend), Tropik Thunder (Indian black tea blend with marigolds, cornflowers, blue mellow flowers, safflowers with passion fruit & mango), Gunpowder (smokey green tea), Gingermint (fresh mint & ginger/honey tea) and Pumpkin High (black tea pumpkin spice blend).

So drop a line if you’re  interested!  mombucha(at)gmail(dot)com.

Healthy holidays!

So here’s my kitchen with all the old photos on my fridge from when I dropped out of college and dove cross-country to San Francisco.  I’m quite meticulous and super clean about everything.  Part of Ruth’s instructions, the original Mombucha Guru Mama, are to make sure your area is clean… so I take that to mean my whole apartment.  All 20 batches of this week’s Mombucha are stacked using counter shelves in 4-quart Pyrex bowls as you can well observe.  Everything’s out in the open as I believe good things should be.

There’s a space heater in the upper left hand corner which, in the winter, warms the little boocha bowls because the heat in my apartment is essentially broken.  In the warm weather months, it’s used as a fan to push the vapors along the corridor up there to the kitchen fan (out of sight to the right on the ceiling) which is running pretty much constantly to suck out the smell which can be intense if not remedied.  The cultures require ventilation as the growing scoby feeds off nutrients in the air.

That other white contraption on top of the fridge is a humidifier which keeps the brew bowls hydrated.  If things get too dry, they can wither and weaken.  The culture really prefers a warm, humid environment to thrive so living in Brooklyn requires a bit of terra forming.

Here’s the bottle depository.  When you swap out your old bottle it gets sterilized with boiling water and vinegar then stored in this little area next to my fridge.  When these guys are ready to fill, I’ll clean them out with more boiling water again just to be sure, flip the top and set them to cure in the coat closet.

Ta-da!  Here the finished brew just sits quietly in an anaerobic environment (closed bottle with no air) where the yeast culture particles devour the residual sugar and pump up the ethel alcohol content slightly.  Still haven’t had my brew tested for how much alcohol is actually in there but those results are imminently forthcoming.  I suspect is somewhere in the 2-3% range.

As you can see, the supply is dwindling steadily (thanks to all of you!) but come this weekend which includes back-to-back events, the Greenpoint Food Market and Dance Dance Library Revolution, I’ll have all 20 of those batches bottled and ready to roll out.  I can’t reveal the new flavors officially yet but just know I’ve got three new blends and a variation on an old one that I’m really looking forward to.

See you this weekend!

Photos courtesy of Veronica Chan of World to Table who also happens to be a phenomenal baker of green tea cookies as well as being a formidable Settler of Catan.  Thanks again!

The Brooklyn Lyceum Food & Craft market was to date the largest market Mombucha’s been a part of and the crowds were thronging.

The Lyceum is a former NYC Public Bath turned performance venue and cafe, with 10,000 sf of useable space right in Park Slope Brooklyn and a terrific location right atop the subway. Our huge raw space with multiple levels lends itself beautifully to events like this, as it is both cavernous and cozy.  Cafe treats, Intelligentsia coffee, beer, food vendors, and a central location make it the perfect crafty marketplace. – BKCraftCentral.com.

The organizers placed most of us food/bev makers in the high tower of the third floor which proved to be a familiar atmosphere of fellow Greenpoint Food Marketeers.  There’s Georgie Castle of Fine & Raw Chocolate on the left.  I even got to meet Eric Childs, owner of Kombucha Brooklyn, which turned into a respectful brothers-in-arms meeting of the fermented minds.

The triumvirate of tea was well represented and even more well received.

Best thing was bartering for this awesome t-shirt from Yoko Kikuchi, owner of Tambey’s Kitchen, a maker of homemade organic cat food.  Yum and thanks!

This is how it went down…

My very much in shape friend, hyper-talented hair stylist, and proprietor of The Parlour Brooklyn in Greenpoint, Nackie (below right), is old friends with a guy named Tim (below left) who’s built like a damn action figure.

Anyway, he’s a kick ass trainer and the two of them had the kick ass idea to clear the styling floor twice a week, lay out some yoga mats, and let Tim go to town on a very small group of hardcore worker-outers.

This was seriously like one of the most intense workouts I’ve ever experienced but the rewards were almost immediate.  Tim has us on our backs, hands, knees, squatting, doing push-ups, kicking, hopping, bending, curtsying and climbing all to some 160 BPM driving dance music.

Nackie’s brilliant idea to invite me down to sample some Mombucha to these health heads prior to the class (that’s Rebecca intently reading the kombucha Wiki) went off without a hitch.

I don’t think I would’ve made it through Tim’s boot camp had it not been for the sips of sunshine from those jugs.  Thanks Nack!  I’ll be back.

Green – White – Black

Yum.

- The three-headed hydra of health.

- What could this many hued mystery be?

- Why, it’s Mombucha’s newest flavor, Thé Vert!  Mild and a little earthy, somewhere between the sweet ‘n mellow Thé Blanc and bold ‘n raw original Ruth’s Blend in flavor.

All three are available now.  Drop a line to mombucha@gmail.com or friend us on Facebook or Twitter and we’ll have some biked over to you lickity split.