#tea mushroom

[paradizetobefound]

Sometimes I really miss tea mushroom but it would be bit troublesome to keep one atm so my tea mushroom needs will have to wait at least this year. Which is shame.

[technariumas]

Last week at the biolab: kombucha leather

Last week we had a guest from kombucha.lt at the biolab who brought samples of kombucha leather he had made!

We talked about the different ways of making it & it’s features (e.g. the one he brought had broken in the cold, even though until then it was keeping perfect leather features for 2 years! perhaps special kind of impregnation would help with that - requires hacking!), kombucha, growing SCOBY, looked at it under the microscope, and started our own SCOBY culture for our own kombucha leather!

Fresh SCOBY - symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast, aka “tea mushroom”, which is what the leather is made from after it grows to 1-2 cm thickness and is dried, and impregnated with oils etc:

Leather under a microscope:

We will likely continue to hacking it during upcoming biohacking Thursdays & Science Hack Day Vilnius 2018, so come along!

[mercurialbadger]

An Idea

The Old Ladies are such an underappreciated social group imo. However, their traditions when growing something are somewhat terrible, especially considering how easy it is for them to start homebrewing something.

It is the raw power that can keep the delicate co-culture that is tea mushroom(kombucha) kept in hundreds of thousands of homes even though there is no known health benefits from drinking the pickled pancake’s acidic piss. 

So, essentially, there needs to be a meme to outmeme this monstrosity out of Old Ladies everyday existence. 

There are two possibilities I am pondering about. 

First one is the manna of ~healthy~food~ hipsters - Spirulina.

The second one is ginseng callus culture. 

Both require preparation of rather complex media for nutrition, and I have no idea how to effectively meme-ify the recipe for Zarrouk or Murashige-Skoog medium. I guess that the sterilisation doesn’t need to be meme-ified since all of the old ladies are familiar with preservation of foods.

I guess that spirulina is a bit easier one, but it requieres light conditions which are not always easy to explain.

If someone can help me I’d be glad.

[dump-sweet-dump]

[pastelroses]

Chloe from chloeniccole dot tumblr dot com recommended kombucha and I’m never listening to her recommendations ever again