Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

The idea is this: I want to get back into fermenting kombucha. It’s a pretty good drink. I haven’t made it in a long while. And I remember in Boston, it was a pretty good winter drink as well because it tended to warm the body with a certain concoction.

The reason I haven’t made much kombucha in the last year or two is because there hasn’t been a lot to experiment with. In Boston, what I liked experimenting with was the different flavor combinations and the base different fruit syrups and so forth. I would buy the ingredients for cheap at Haymarket. And either boil and pound them down or grind them down or heat them up or somehow process them to be used with kombucha for flavoring. I can’t find anything that cheap to flavor my kombucha. I have a dehydrator. I have a blender. I have a spice grinder, but none of them help me since the flavoring agents are so freaking expensive.

However, there’s a way now, and I am so excited to explore it. Turns out Agrud and his wife, Suveksha, have been juicing a lot of ginger roots and turmeric roots. Ginger and turmeric is such a warm, wintry taste that excites one potential possibility for flavoring. I tried a shot of ginger turmeric juice, and yum! It really wakes one. My goal is to get back to making kombucha, with the ultimate goal being to experiment with new flavor combos and processes.

What flavors might I experiment with? Ginger, as I’ve already said. Turmeric, carrots. Chili pepper, Serrano, jalapeño, and so forth. I want to put lime and lemon. I want to put pineapple. I want to try a bunch of these things additionally.

I want to start making kombucha with slightly better tea than the crappiest black tea, the cheapest Lipton tea that I can find in the market. I want to start making kombucha with actually decent tea. And not let it ferment until it’s absurdly disgustingly bitter. I want to preserve the flavor of the tea still with good tea, and add the awesome flavor combinations. It would probably take me until January or February to get a good batch out, but that’s fine. That’s what life is like. The reason that I got into these projects is to explore exactly these combinations, and I’m excited for it.

Since I’m only on five minutes, I want to include the rest of the time in casually discussing flavoring and process opportunities with chhyang making or rice wine making.

I have been thinking of toasting my rice before boiling or steaming it when I make my rice wine. That is going to be an experimental step to do. The other is going to be: I’m going to add multiple boiled batches into one big bucket and combine rice batches over multiple days and weeks into one bucket. I’ve always done one batch at a time, and doing that, you know, may create interesting results that I want to explore.

The third technique I want to try is a bit weird, and I don’t know how well it’s going to go, but we’ll see. I want to buy the flavoring chips, the wood chips they use to flavor whiskey and wine, and so forth. And toast it, and mix it with rice wine. I want to see how the wood chips affect the flavor and texture and overall experience of drinking _chhyang_40.

Additionally, I want to go back to trying one experiment that succeeded in the past, but I haven’t gone back, and blending the rice grains themselves with the chhyang_41. And treating _chhyang as a thicker, syrupy drink like Irish cream, instead of necessarily discarding the leftover rice as waste. Adding that with different flavoring combinations might be interesting.

Couple more discussions on flavoring opportunities. Something that necessarily didn’t work right the time before was the flavors. There were some strong flavors, and there were some weak flavors. But people seemed to not prefer one over the other because they didn’t seem to have strong extraction at all.

What I want to do now is create a tea out of the herbs and flavor my future brews with the warm water. It will, of course, dilute the brew. But the goal is that the flavor extraction will be larger, and I’ll be able to understand the change in people’s preferences clearer if the flavors are sharper.

One final final thing that I wanted to do that I almost forgot was I want to very sharply change the texture profile of chhyang by adding agar-agar into the bottles or serving dishes. The idea is to see: is chhyang jelly a viable product? That’s number one. Number two is, if it is viable, is it more of a drunk college student fun thing to do, or actually a proper dessert that people in respected communities can drink with their family and friends? And number three: if I add just enough agar, a small amount of agar, can it just be a thickening agent instead of the gelling agent? That way, I could change the mouthfeel of my drinks without resorting to herbs and roots too much.

Just a final comment on herbs and roots: I will definitely go back to herbs and roots and boiling them and powdering them and working with those in the future for rice wine as well as kombucha. I need to get on that. Even if I don’t use them immediately, I have a big fridge space that I can store them in. So that would be a third step in my journey of herbalism and herbal experiments.