Kombucha or Sweet Tea Beer: A New and Slimy Way to Quench Your Thirst!

Sweet Tea Beer or Kombucha as it is called here, is fermented from tea, with a sugar source and a "mother of vinegar" as a bacterial source. This produces a refreshing, slightly tart and slightly sweet, fizzy drink. Any sort of tea can be used with an admixture of fruit juices, other flavors and other sources of sugars. The flavors are quite variable and can range from green tea, black tea, fruit juice, sugar, herbs and spices or any flavor people can come up with. The alcohol produced is about 1 to 1.5 percent, and adds to the refreshing taste, along with a bit of fizziness.

This type of product is traditionally used as a soft drink in Russia and China. The custom of making this slightly alcoholic drink at home makes sense in countries where the food distribution system is poor, and where there is great pressure to save money on food. The effort in making it is not great but it does require a bit of skill and a stable home since the fermentation process takes about a week.

Now Kombucha is being introduced in the US as a commercial product, like bottled soda or fruit juice. I like the flavor of Sweet Tea Beer, since it is light and refreshing. It is a pleasing drink for an adult, and certainly better than a children's drink like grape soda. There is a wide variety of combination flavors and they are quite charming but they really just seem to give an "appearance of choice" because actually the main ingredients are sugar and water. Sweet Tea Beer is acceptable for a novelty or a treat, but at $3.95 a bottle, it isn't a good choice if the purpose is to quench the thirst.

Personally, I could do without this product. It has all the disadvantages of soft drinks and even some disadvantages they don't have. The carbonation and sugar are things most people are trying to avoid now. I suppose there may be a health benefit if the basis of the drink is green tea, but I doubt that this is significant. More important, I am very leery of products that have "slight" amounts of alcohol in them which may prove confusing or tempting to children or to adults who have a problem with alcohol. Furthermore, the process of fermenting this beverage is revolting, though approximately the same process is used to produce vinegar. And finally the process of producing, distributing and selling drinks in glass bottles has a huge carbon footprint. If you want green tea, just buy the green tea and make a cup with hot water at your convenience, and skip the fermentation, bottling and sweetening processes.