Okay, I am not actually making hooch. I am making
Jun, which, I think, is just fancy
Kombucha. I received a mother scoby two weeks ago at the
Food for Life event at Sequatchie Valley Institute. As soon as I got home I made a batch of strong Green Tea & added honey. I let the brew sit overnight so that the chlorine would dissipate from the tap water. The next morning I carefully placed the scoby into the room temperature tea / honey mix and thus started my first batch of
Jun. I was told that this mother scoby was different from a kombucha mother scoby because it needed honey for food and not white sugar. I can't really speak to that, this is my second experiment in
fermented beverage (first is the mead we also made that weekend).
Anywho, I left for the
Quilt Symposium of Alabama in Cullman three days later, leaving the
Jun to do whatever it did. I arrived home on Sunday, kissed the kids and checked the hooch (the mead and the
Jun). The mead looked good, the
Jun scoby, which was floating peacefully on the top when I left, was all kattywampus. My beloved stirred the wrong concoction. Oh NO!!!
No fear! I would see what the
Jun tasted like after a week and start a new batch. I was happy to discover that even thought the
Jun had a rough week, the mother scoby created a daughter scoby and the mixture had a sweetish fermented / vinegary smell. Using CLEAN hands I scooped out the scoby and placed it in a clean container, decanted about 80% of the
Jun into another clean plastic container and put it in the fridge.
Drum Roll Please!!!
After chilling the
Jun for a few hours we had a taste test. And the results are:
Daddy - Yum!
Red 1 - Supper Yum, makes her feel as good as an hour of Yoga. Drama much!
Red 2 - Yuck!
Mommy - Hmm... This taste like really tart unsweetened carbonated tea, not sure I can swing it with out some juice mixed in.
From what I have read and what I was told this mixture could be carbonated (ours was), should still be kinda sweet after only a week (ours was not) and should have a very low alcohol level (did not perceive any alcohol reaction).
So you might want to know where I came up with the title of this entry. Well, I am getting there.
Double fermentation, I read an interesting article at
Food Renegade that had you pouring some fruit juice into a mason jar, adding your kombucha and closing up the jar for another 48 hours. I figured it might be better for me than adding straight up sugar to the
Jun and it should work cause I kinda think that
Jun & kombucha are the same basic process. Using a mason jar, I added a cup of Cherry juice and then filled the the jar with Jun. Then I tossed it in the car and drove it to Ohio for a quilt show. My mason jar full of
Cherry Jun got an odd reaction from my other mother and super quilt helper. She smelled it and tasted it and promptly decided I was brewing hooch. If you have consumed homemade kombucha or made it yourself you know that once you separate from its mother it get lonely and grews a new mother. Not really, it just continues to do whatever fermenting it was already doing and a scum forms on the top that will become a new mother. Still not a darling image.
How is it that I am fermenting
Jun in my hotel room? I had a glass of
Jun the first day, on the second day I realized that I would run out of Jun before I returned home to my stash, I mean the new
Jun I started before I left. What to do, go without?? Well I have only been drinking it for 3 days so it would not be a super tragedy. OR I could go to the free breakfast buffet and make a cup of super strong green tea and get a glass of cranberry juice (which might have been a bad choice cause I think cranberries are antiseptic) and add it to my mason jar of hooch, I mean
Jun.
So we got home from the quilt show this evening and I checked on my
Jun, it is well on it way to making a new mother and it is very carbonated. I will check it in the morning and see if it is palatable.
Just for the record, I think I am actually just making carbonated juice and it probably has very few of the esteemed and oft lauded wonders of the miraculous kombucha (maybe aka)
Jun.
A few weeks ago I went to Tennessee to see what I could see about eating real food. Well, I came back with a Jun scoby (fancy kombucha scoby) and some just started Mead. Today behold the top of my refrigerator.
