As the green tea-sugar water mixture cools in the recycled olive jar, the SCOBY waits patiently to be added to the mix and begin its fermenting magic. While waiting I listened to the men’s semifinal (Roddick-Murray) on Radio Wimbledon.

I’m trying my hand at my first homebrewed kombucha thanks to Chris’s generous gift of a thriving SCOBY (short for Symbiotic Colony of Bacteria and Yeast). For those of you who haven’t tasted kombucha – it is a sweetened fermented tea that has been described as an “immortal health elixir.

Kombucha, which dates back to the Qin Dynasty in China (250 B.C.), balances the middle Qi (spleen and stomach) which in turn aids digestion and allows your body to focus on healing. Just what I need!

First you brew tea (green tea in my case) and mix it with sugar water before adding the SCOBY to the concoction. I just bottled my first batch and will now wait for a couple weeks before I decant it into smaller bottles and get it ready for drinking.