For the past two weeks, my roommate has been making kombucha at home. As I’ve observed the process and sampled the batches at each stage, I’ve gathered some notes about this particular art form.
First Fermentation
Step 1: Brew black tea and add to SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast)
The car pulls up to the back side of Andrews. Bowen Street is bustling with swarms of first years and their families—some, like you, who have only just arrived, and others who are done unpacking, preparing for tearful goodbyes. A swirl of mist drifts across your skin. In the rainy haze, you try to latch on to any signs of familiarity from your visit six months ago, scanning blurry faces and buildings. For a moment, your shoes are glued to the ground as strangers and walls and time pass you in waves of vertigo. When your parents have their backs turned, you have the sudden urge to run to the car and drive back home. Your eyes begin to sting, but you blink away the tears and swallow the lump in your throat. You can’t start crying just yet.
Finally, you find the will to trudge up the glass stairs of Miller where your new home awaits, nestled in the corner of the second floor. The doorknob turns, and one of your roommates greets you. You exchange hugs and introduce yourself to her parents. She seems to be settled in already, and that intimidates you. But in a way, it calms you too. You think maybe you’ll adjust with just as much ease.
The next few weeks and months are inundated with “nice to meet you,” “let’s get lunch,” “Ratty at 6.” One day, as you’re heading to class, you bump into someone who is also on his way out of Miller. You realize that you’re both heading to Salomon DECI for Principles of Econ. You follow him toward the front of the lecture hall (you wouldn’t dare to go so far on your own), and he leads you to a row where two girls are already seated in the middle. He breaks their chatter, and their gaze shifts onto you. You grin (or grimace) timidly to say hello. Fifty minutes later, class ends, and you grin (or grimace) again to say goodbye, then sprint out the door. Little do you know that this will become routine: walk together from Miller, sit in class, rush out to beat the flock. After a few more classes, instead of sprinting away at the chime of the bell, you join them for Starbucks or lunch at the Lotus Pepper food truck.
More activities become regular. Falling asleep on the Salomon balcony in CS15 until the Just Dance music jolts you awake for a stretch break, following your friends to the Jameson-Mead fourth-floor lounge afterward, accepting the fate of the Keeney cough, and taking the campus shuttle back to North Campus at the end of a long day.
Tea is the foundation for the kombucha’s flavor. Add in SCOBY and like a kombucha starter, it begins to take effect.
Step 2: Add sugar and water
On your hunt for new study spaces, you excavate the treasures of the CIT fifth floor and the common room in Rhode Island Hall. Early signs of spring prompt you to brave your first adventure together outside the confines of campus. You journey to Wayland Square, admiring the houses on Waterman and reintegrating yourself into civilization.
The next year, you venture further down South Campus to Orwig, then Coffee Exchange, Amy’s, and Tea in Sahara. The housing lottery in April last spring left your group with the last two rooms in Perkins, but conveniently, this forces you to occupy new spaces and make them your own.
After testing with room temperature, storing locations, and ratios of water and sugar, eventually the correct conditions allow the SCOBY to consume the sugar and turn it into acetic acid, resulting in a fizzy carbonation. Here, the signature characteristics of kombucha start to emerge.
Step 3: Cover with breathable cloth, secure with rubber bands, and let sit for 7-10 days
Most days, however, are filled with nothing. Sprawled on the rug playing Bananagrams, drinking Trader Joe’s Winter Wake Up Tea, sitting on the floor recounting events from the day in painstaking detail, telling the same stories over and over again. Laughing about unforgivable jokes, jokes that turn into comedic gestures, gestures that turn into a secret lingo until eventually, you adopt mannerisms and adages from one another.
You attempt to pull an all-nighter on the last day. It’s already midnight and you plan on watching the sunrise, so you convince yourselves that “five more hours is nothing.” You crowd around a small laptop screen to watch She’s the Man, but a few moments later, exhaustion prevails. One friend slips next door to sleep in her own bed and tells you to wake her up in an hour. The rest of you curl up on the floor and hope that someone else has set an alarm. It was a valiant effort.
The alarm goes off, and everyone awakes groggily in disarray. The car ride there is silent as everyone snags a few extra minutes of rest. It’s already May, but the temperature outside feels like February. You blanket each other with warm embraces, and for a moment, the nothingness feels like everything.
Soon, you leave for summer break, and before long, it’s already halfway over.
Oxygen seeps through the cloth. Hints of tartness and tanginess diffuse throughout the mixture, a quiet dance toward homeostasis.
Second Fermentation
Step 1: Pour previous fermentation from the jar into smaller glass bottles
You return in the fall to a newly built dorm, completed so recently that the paint on the walls is still drying. At last, you have a room to yourself this year. The privacy is nice, but the ceilings stretch unusually high, the air is a bit colder, and the silence is slightly unnerving.
Eventually, you realize that peacefulness is an indication of stability. You burrow in the nooks of your new comfort spots. You make Nitro Bar a routine, and Lincoln Woods becomes your refuge. The pictures in your camera roll are adorned with the cozy, muted palette of autumn and the usual rotation of familiar faces you see every day. Your bubble crystallizes, almost to the point of imperviousness. In your world, only 10 to 15 people exist, but for now, you’re okay with that.
Smaller seal-tight jars allow for further carbonation. In a more controlled environment with less exposure to air, the bubbles develop more intensely as the kombucha ferments for longer.
Step 2: Add fruit and sugar to taste
After a short while, the monotony pleads for a change, for another period of experimentation and exploration. This time, you have more mobility, more freedom to roam. You escape to the coast of Massachusetts and Maine and the mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire, until you’ve scattered memories along every path in New England.
New flavor dimensions from fruit and spices are combined to personalize the kombucha to your own taste. After much trial and error, the perfect concoction does exist.
You buy tickets for three concerts for next fall, a year in advance. You become interested in post- after your friend tells you she needs another writer in her section. When another friend says he needs more drivers for his club’s ski trip, you say yes despite only knowing two others who are going. The solar eclipse is two weeks away, and you plan a last-minute trip to Burlington, Vermont to be in the path of totality. On the drive up, the anticipation is palpable.
The sun comes out more often now. It’s National Ice Cream Day, and you get your free cone from Ben and Jerry’s. The sweet taste of mango lingers, and you savor it until the very last bite. On your walk back to the Main Green, you stop by a tawny brown house that’s soon to be yours. You’ve walked past it probably hundreds of times before, but this time it’s just the three of you so you pause to take a picture together.
You take another picture like this on the first day of senior year.
Step 3: Screw tight and let sit for 2-3 days
This half of the year has felt shorter than the first, and the days seem to slip away ever so quietly. So you slow it down a bit. You sit on a dock and bask in the sun. He’s reading John Green, and you’re reading Hiroko Oyamada. On the car ride to and from Maren Morris, you listen to her talk about studying abroad and share stories that span the past and the future. Each moment you’ve spent in a coffee shop together, your stay grows longer—an hour and a half at Coffee Exchange, two and a half at Nitro Bar, nearly five at Little City and Caffe Nero. You trust in the timing of things.
With patience and persistence, the final product is one crafted with love, devotion, and understanding.
***
It’s 9 p.m.. You have two assignments to finish before class tomorrow, but your friend has a flight to catch at 6 a.m., so you plan to stop by her house for a few minutes to give her cookies that you and your roommates baked last night. She hands you Fun Dip in exchange, then you drive together to meet with another friend. She hops into the car too, and now you’re in your typical formation: huddled around the center console, heads nearly touching, entranced in laughter and conversation.
You don’t remember what you talked about or how an hour has passed—an hour that turns into two weeks, three months, four years.
Graduation is 95 days away. You can’t start crying just yet.
