At the beginning of 2020 I went for my yearly physical and told my doctor, “I know I need to take off a few pounds but I don’t want to focus on that. I want to focus on being healthy and strong.”

She said that sounded like a good plan and referred me to a facility. “Several of my patients have had good results working with them,” she said.

I have been working with a nutritionist there since the beginning of the year and I’ve had very little weight loss (remember, that’s not my focus this year), but I have had some great improvements. I’ll blog for about that at another time.

My nutritionist introduced me to kombucha, a fermented tea that contains a “symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast (SCOBY).” It’s the good bacteria you need in your gut. Our American diets are not all that friendly toward our guts, and medication affects that, too. I’d been drinking it for a couple of weeks and doing my best to find it on sale whenever I could since it is a bit pricy (about $3.00 a bottle) but I was feeling the benefits from drinking it so I wanted to continue drinking it each day.

Because I wanted to cut the cost of adding this healthy beverage to my diet, I looked into making it myself. I told my dietitian about my interest and to my surprise, she said, “I brew my own and if you want to try it, I’ll give you a starter SCOBY.” I was rather excited about that. I went home and found a jar to get my Kombucha started in. I also began saving my drinking bottles from the readymade Kombucha I had been purchasing from the store.

After I was given the SCOBY and I gently put it in its new home. (The SCOBY is kind of creepy looking). I brewed the tea, added the sugar, and followed all of the other directions and got it going, sending pictures to my Nutritionist along the way to make sure it was looking and doing what it was supposed to do. So far, so good. I haven’t been able to taste it yet (it is not ready yet) but it has been brewing for 2 weeks now and I am getting excited to give it a try. I’ll continue this story in a later blog when my Kombucha has reached ‘perfection’ and I no longer need to spend $3.00 a day on a bottle from the grocery store.

For now, here are some pictures I have taken of my first Kombucha brew. For sure, there will be more later on.