Hito's Homemade are all live, cultured foods, hand crafted in small batches, utilizing high-quality ingredients, served exclusively at Heartwood Institute in Northern California. Kombucha can be enjoyed as a tasty soft drink (though an acquired taste) or used intentionally as part of a cleansing regimen. Work up to drinking a dose each and every day!

Kombucha is a presumably ancient beverage created by brewing a strong and sweet caffeinated tea and introducing a specific yeast and bacteria culture. The micro-critters devour the caffeine and glucose and produce a substance called gluconic acid, which is highly alkalizing and encourages the liver to release stored toxins for processing by the body - not to be taken lightly!

It additionally has all of the benefits of any probiotic: aids the digestive system (rather than diluting gastric juices), is high in B-class vitamins and amino acids, supports the immune system, and so on.

Of course, I can't prove any of this through personal research, nor has the FDA evaluated these comments, I suppose.

How Kombucha Works

Kombucha qualifies as a superfood. After a period of adjustment, the body is really able to utilize the broad spectrum of benefits this particular ferment offers.

• Astringent to the liver, in Chinese medicine Kombucha can help to relax the onset of anger or frustration.
• The microbiotic elements of Kombucha not only support digestive function and battle candida, they themselves are nutrition, aiding in appetite regulation and controlling sugar cravings.
• Highly alkalizing, Kombucha can help to regulate blood pH (especially for folks who prefer a high-protein diet) and create an internal environment that resists inflammation and abnormal growths, thusly taking pressure off of the over-burdened immune system.
  
  This unique and ancient beverage is a powerful and efficient source of nutrition for the human organism!

The how of this is, of course, an aspect of the Great Mystery - the barely palpable spark of creative potential that exists in all things. The electricity of the body and the arrangement of the charkas, luck and coincidence, a 28 day lunar cycle, internal combustion, the food-chain - all of these are elements of vast and uncomprehendable cycles of universal order. Each of us is an interlocking component of an unfathomable mechanism of energy and matter. Kombucha, somehow, makes that job go a little smoother.

Clinical research on kombucha is uncommon, but a couple of good studies have been done. If you want to get into the nitty-gritty of it, check out the e-book Analyses of Kombucha Ferments available from Kombucha-Research.com or track down Christopher Hobbs' out-of-print book Kombucha: Tea Mushroom : The Essential Guide.

How to Make Kombucha

You need kombucha to brew kombucha, and the most common way that people begin to brew their own kombucha tea is by acquiring a living kombucha culture, called a kombucha mushroom (a complete misnomer, really not a mushroom at all) or SCOBY (Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria and Yeast, the technical term), which resembles a flat disk of flesh, if you want to imagine that.

Hito's Homemade began when Mojohito was gifted a scoby by a friend who was already brewing kombucha regularly.

Recent experimentation has shown, however, that having a fully-formed scoby is not absolutely necessary to start an active kombucha ferment. The microorganisms that turn sugary tea into kombucha tea are alive and dormant in each bottle of Hito's Homemade you bring home from the Co-op, and these creatures can be reactivated and urged to create a new scoby by offering them the right environment and nutriton.

Interested?

Here's how to do it:

Ingredients & Supplies:

• One or two bottles of Hito's Homemade Heady Liver Whippin' Kombucha or GT Dave's Original Kombucha (avoid the stuff with juice and other flavors blended in)
• Black or Green Tea (about 1/4 cup loose or 5 to 8 tea bags)
• 1/2 - 3/4 cup white sugar
• Glass or ceramic 2 quart container; even a big bowl ought to work. You may want an even bigger container once you've re-activated the culture and developed your own scoby, but for the inital batch a half-gallon is all you'll need.
• Clean food-grade cheesecloth or a pillowcase
• Some rubber bands suitable for securing the cheesecloth over the top of your container.
• A warm, clean, dark space where your fermentation container can live undisturbed.

Procedure:

Cleanliness is key, so make sure your hands and all utensils are washed often and rinsed maybe in some water with a couple teaspoons of vinegar.

1. Allow your kombucha tea to come to room temperature. Open the bottles to let them breathe.
2. Bring to boil 2 quarts (half-gallon) of clean filtered or distilled water to a boil and add the tea and sugar. The tea should stronger and sweeter than you would want to drink.
3. Allow the tea to come to room temperature (or slightly warmer) in a covered container - you don't want any opportunistic microorganism to innoculate your tea before you can introduce the kombucha.
4. Pour the bottles of kombucha tea into your freshly cleaned fermentation vessel.
5. Top off the container with the sweet tea you brewed.
6. Cover with the clean cheesecloth or pillowcase and secure with rubber bands. Kombucha likes oxygen, but mold will damage your kombucha badly. You want air in, but bugs out.
7. Check on it over the next few days, gently and respectfully - remember that kombucha is very much alive and needs to be treated as a being. After three or four days, you will find that a film or skin has grown across the top. Congratulations! You've birthed a scoby!
8. Let the kombucha ferment for seven to ten days, depending on your taste. Pour it off into a recycled glass juice bottle once it's reached the stage you like, and store it in the fridge.
9. Prepare your next batch of tea and allow it to cool before you harvest, so that your baby scoby will have fresh nutrition right away. Once you have a scoby, you can increase the amount of tea you feed the kombucha (always include some of the finished kombucha tea with the new batch). Gallon jars are commonly used for a personal brewing setup.

Beware of mold! If you see mold growing in your kombucha, toss it, without hesitation. Mold can seriously toxify a batch of kombucha, and if you drink the stuff you can get very sick. Don't mess around, seriously.

This is really just an introduction and a DIY startup plan. Do your research and feel free to experiment. Visit the Kombucha Tea tribe at Tribe.net to connect with a community of kombucha brewers. You can always contact Mojohito with questions.

Happy brewing!