Welcome to the LOTUS Challenge! @naturalmedicie has created a challenge where we can offer an alternative to an industrially made product, that is better for the earth, and better for our health, than its store bought counterpart. When I saw this challenge, I knew exactly what to post on: Soda-pop (the original type).
Going back to the Roots
In Mexico where I live soft drinks are highly popular. You can see almost everyone drinking them all the time. Beside the famous international brands (sorry, I refuse to mention them by name) there are a number of Mexican ones. Sadly, their ingredients are at best of little benefit to the body, and ant worst highly poisonous. Phosphoric acid, for example should have never been classified as "food acid", as it binds otherwise beneficial calcium and magnesium in the blood, forming crystals that may get stuck in the kidney, where they grow into stones with further consumption. Worst of all, every single type of pop is simply overloaded with sugar.
As it is, people either drink these toxic substances without paying a thought to their health, or they flat out refuse to go anywhere near soda. However, there is a way to enjoy a nice fizzy drink with a sweet-sour flavor of fruit or herbs, that not only are free from any harmful ingredients, but are actually good for our health. In fact, for the thousands of years in the history of soft drinks, that's exactly what pop used to be... until industrialization changed them completely.
A Refreshment Full of Life
Today, many people don't know what to think of when they hear the name tibicos. The same goes for its alternative monikers, such as water kefir, ginger bees, eternity grains, let alone balm of Gilead. Whichever name you use, the idea is the same: a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeasts (SCOBY). Not unlike (though in its composition entirely different from) the more commonly known kombucha.
This culture lives in water and feeds on glucose. So by leaving it a jar, with water and sugar it's going to grow. In the meantime it will transform its living environment, add itself to it, consume most of the sugar, make it sparkling, and give it a sourish taste. In the end you'll have more cultures, plus a refreshing sparkling drink, with a bit of a sweet-sour taste. And all this without adding extra flavor. However, if you add some type of herbs, fruit, flowers, or roots, you can create the most delicious types of soda, and the range of possibilities is without limits!
Life Begets Life - And Strengthens It
The best part about this drink happens after we consume it. The diversity of bacteria we ingest has its immediate effect on the gut flora. If we are not used to drinking it, we may feel a bit of activity in our intestines for the first days. Soon we will notice the beneficial effect it has on our digestion. After all, it is not our body that digests the food we eat, but all the species of microbes that live within our digestive tract. If it weren't for them, we could be eating the best food that's around, and all those good nutrients would pass through our system, leaving our bodies hungry for more. It is therefor not uncommon that regular consumers of tibicos tend to lose weight (or gain some) reaching their optimal health. But that is only the beginning.
Digestive and Immune Systems
A greater diversity of life inside us also means a stronger immune system. Each new arrival has to fight harder for a niche in our system, and should anything attack us, chances are higher that they will be destroyed by some other thing. Just like how a diverse forest is more resistant against any one species of bugs. Also, since the cultural make-up of the SCOBY is always changing, there is always a possibility that some harmful bacteria enters it. Even if the other members of the culture don't destroy it, they keep it sufficiently in check so it will never build up a population that's needed to actually make us sick. But our own immune system will remember it when it kills it, getting a head start on fighting the infection, should it ever face it again.
Discovering Tibicos
Many years ago a neighbor of mine gave me a batch of cultures. We talked about milk kefir, another, somewhat better known probiotic culture, that lives in milk, and feeds on lactose. I had never heard of water kefir before, so I was quite excited to give it a try. I've been making it ever since. At first I made it only with raisins, following the given recipe to the letter. (70 g of sugar, a handful of fruit, a handful of cultures, in a liter of water, let it sit for 1-2 days at room temperature.) Later I started deviating from it a bit, trying my luck with dried berries, until I realized that I could be as free in my experimentation as I wanted.
Trying Out Various Ingredients
What followed were tibicos made with anything from kiwifruit to dates, from mangoes to apricots, and from flowers of elderberry to kitchen herbs (mint and basil being the favorites). The most popular type, however, was with ginger. No wonder, many names of the culture include 'ginger', such as the GBP which stands for Ginger Beer Plant (though it's neither a plant, nor does it make beer, and leaving ginger as an optional ingredient).
I tried out various things in the sugar department as well: from refined white sugar I switched to brown sugar, then to piloncillo or unrefined cane sugar, and even experimented with good organic honey. In the end I realized that the bacteria don't care. They only want glucose, the rest is more about pleasing us. In this sense I considered it a waste of good honey to give it to the tibicos. Also, the piloncillo gave it a weird taste I didn't like, so I was back to brown or white sugar.
Why Didn't I Make Tibicos Sooner?
Making tibicos is so easy, and so cost efficient, that I was surprised I hadn't discovered it before. But then again, like most of us, I simply hadn't even herd about it. Soft drinks are generally associated with what we know from the store, leaving its pre-industrial type beyond the veil of forgetting. The other reason is the availability of the cultures, because in order to grow some yourself, you need to know someone who already does. Since the cultures multiply quickly, they are most probably happy to give you some. But that first hurdle of finding someone like that can be a major one. I know, in Canada I spent months looking for it, before giving up entirely.
Fragile Little Creatures
Over the years that I spent making tibicos, I ran into little difficulties. Most combinations of flavors turned out to be quite tasty, and even if someone didn't like something (like myself, I'm no great fan of mint) there was always someone who did enjoy it. However, there were some occasions when the culture just appeared to be dying. Instead of growing bigger and more numerous, the crystals got smaller and fewer, until there was literally nothing left of them. Fortunately I had prepared for this back when it was reproducing fast, and I always had some culture stashed away in my freezer. There they could be kept indefinitely, in case something like this happened. I did the same thing with my milk kefir, as well as with my kombucha (though just in the fridge, not the freezer), but those two cultures seem to be stronger. It was only the tibicos that was prone to dying unexpectedly.
Learning From Sandor Katz
At first I used to surf the web for additional information on using my probiotic cultures, but once I discovered Sandor Katz, I realized that he had all the info one could ever want, in his book The Art of Fermentation. In it he gives us a rough history of how fermentation was used over the centuries, gives a discourse on the importance of the microbes living in our bodies, but most of all, offers a practical guide on how to use different fermentation techniques in our own homes. Making healthy soft drinks is only a small part in all of this. I can highly recommend it to anyone interested in keeping ourselves health, while using traditional techniques to turn the abundance of food into an even richer abundance of nutrition, and all this using the means and infrastructure of our homes.
