Fermented tea drink looks like pond scum but is delicious and healthy

Artichokes are one of my favourite foods, yet I've often wondered what masochist first took it upon himself to eat one.

Questions about the wisdom of our ancestors' culinary choices returned to me the first time I tried kombucha. I knew that the drink was based on very old traditions. I'd also heard health-conscious friends extol its virtues.

Still, when I peered into the clear, brownish liquid and saw little floating strands of what I now know to be culture but looked a bit like pond scum, I thought: Really? I never see strands of slime floating in my Coke Zero. If I did, I'd probably be on the phone to a lawyer, making plans to quit my day job once I got the settlement money. Accustomed as most of us are to the industrial sameness of most bottled beverages, the look of kombucha might initially give you the heebie-jeebies.

And yet the drink was delicious: tart, lightly sweet, fizzy. Once I mixed some kombucha with gin and tonic syrup, I was sold; the resulting highball was crisp and tart. Many kombuchas remind me of vinegar fruit shrubs and can be used similarly. The ones that have gone through a second fermentation stage have the added appeal of carbonation. Many of them mix beautifully with spirits.

"You're playing with that same shrub acidity with the added benefits of what kombucha brings to you," says Kavita Singh Brar, co-owner of New Heights restaurant in Washington, and its tiny downstairs bar, the Gin Joint.