Do you drink this fizzy drink that’s good for your gut yet?
Kombucha has been consumed for thousands of years for health and pleasure. It’s rich in beneficial probiotics, and contains antioxidants … we think it’s delicious (and is even a great cocktail/mocktail mixer), but …
Not All Kombucha Is Created Equal
Kombucha is a naturally acidic drink that continues to ferment and becomes more acidic the longer it sits in bottles. If your Kombucha is in a plastic bottle instead of glass, it can leech … which means you are drinking plastic. Also, the world does NOT need more plastic! So … glass is the best option for brewing and packaging kombucha … for human and environmental health reasons. Not only will it not react to the acidity of the brew, it won’t have those nasty toxins in them.
Kombucha is beneficial because it’s considered a LIVING food … which means it needs to be a refrigerated product. If Kombucha is shelf stable, it’s not really kombucha! All store-bought “raw” kombucha needs to be kept cold, and it needs to remain cold even before opening the bottle. Raw kombucha contains a live culture and is unpasteurized. Refrigeration is required to keep the culture dormant, basically asleep. Pasteurized kombucha is shelf-stable and can be stored at room temperature. Pasteurization is a process that uses heat to kill microbes in food products to increase their shelf life. This can be a good thing for killing harmful bacteria in our modern world, but, the problem is that pasteurization also kills beneficial bacteria and yeast found in kombucha. By removing the living bacteria, it eliminates the health benefits provided by drinking kombucha. So, why are you drinking it? Why is the company selling it as a health product? Knowing this, some kombucha manufacturers add probiotics back into the kombucha after being pasteurized to make claims.
A note about any drinks in plastic … it is easily damaged and the scratches in the bottles can harbour foreign bacteria. Even if it’s food-grade, it may contain undesirable chemicals that can be harmful to the kombucha SCOBY, and to our internal and external environment. We steer clear of cans for similar reasons. All cans for food and drink … not just for Kombucha.
So far we have determined glass bottles of Kombucha, only from the fridge.
What else do you need to consider?
Discover more including our favourite Kind Kombucha in The Wellness Intelligence Collective.
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