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Welcome to the Museum of Ephemerata's Kombucha Research Station, bottlers of Doc. Chowder's Revivifying Tonic, healthy homebrew kombucha tea! Note: We regret to inform you that as of March 2008, the Kombucha Research Station has closed. In the rainy spring of 2007, the kombucha colonies picked up a mold hitchiking on a draft, making it unsafe to drink. We composted it under our fig trees. Thanks, kombucha, for four years of symbiosis!
Kombucha tea is a non-alcoholic fermented beverage with origins in Eurasia. With its wide range of purported medicinal qualities and its quirky, vinegary flavor, the tea has developed a global network of culturers and a burgeoning commercial distribution.
Your curators founded the Museum's Kombucha Research Station from a culture gifted to us by the elusive and mysterious Doc. Chowder, a cat-like world traveler. Since receiving Doc.'s culture one Brooklyn summer in 2002, our kombucha production has topped 10 gallons a month!
Kombucha fermenting in gallon jars
The Research Station's goals are fourfold. First and most simply, we aim to provide a good home for kombucha as a living display within the Museum and, by drinking the tea, to literally allow the Museum to live within us. Second, we wish to provide information and kombucha cultures to our visitors. Third, we seek to electrify a growing scientific discourse on the kombucha organism and its health benefits by proposing several tentative lines of research: that the organism may have extraterrestrial origins; that the organism's symbiotic relationship with humans might serve as a model for an ecosophical movement; that the spent cultures may be used as leather substitutes; &c. Finally, the Research Station's chief production - Doc. Chowder's Revivifying Tonic - serves as a crown jewel in our line of novelty souvenirs and thus provides another means of support for achieving the Museum's varied pragmatic programs and practical jokes.