How Can I Make Delicious Chia Seed Kombucha Taste Better? (part 1)
May 11th 2016 by Dave "Kombucha" Lindenbaum
video highlights:
  • Chia seeds and kombucha are a match made in heaven IF done correctly.
  • Chia seeds act like a sponge... if the sponge is hydrated first it will then pass on that hydration to whatever it comes in contact with.  If the sponge is not initially hydrated it will absorb whatever it comes in contact with, hence an opposite drying out effect.
  • The best way to incorporate chia seeds into your kombucha is to first create a chia gel!
ehanced video Transcription:
But First Let's Get Personal.... My 2nd Daddy Duty Day!

Hey everybody. It's Dave. I am on daddy duty. My wife and my mother-in-law have bestowed this great responsibility while they take care of some errands, and I've got to tell you, I don't want to jinx it, but Emma has been an angel. She is 3 feet away from me and is quiet and sleeping, and probably dreaming about things that you and I can only imagine or not imagine.

Anyway, I wanted to personally thank all the people that replied back wishing my wife and I and our family lots of mazel or blessings and prayers and thoughts. I apologize, I just don't have the time to respond to each and every single one of you, but I did read every single response that came in, and there were like hundreds, guys. It was beautiful and touching, and thank you so, so much. 

Some people just wrote a congratulations and other people wrote a nice kind of a chapter in their lives reminiscing about when their children were of this age. The number one response that everyone, it's kind of the general consensus was life moves fast, and to really enjoy the moment. 

You know, truthfully I needed to hear that because I'm so busy now with the business and still maintaining wanting to, I refuse to give up my relationship with my customers. I still handle a huge bulk of the customer support. We have a support team, but I still try to respond personally when people respond to me personally. Sometimes I can't, and for sure still wanting to continue with just building a tribe, a community.

Life moves fast, so let's get to it right now with the Ask Dave of the Week video series, and this is it. I thought to change it up and do a live screen cast video of a question that came in. 

The Inner Circle

This is our Inner Circle, so there's thirty now, probably thirty three thousand people on our newsletter, and there's nine hundred and twenty three members in our Inner Circle. It's a private group here. It's Dave's super awesome secret group. 

The doors are currently closed, but we'll be reopening them very soon, and if you're interested in joining, let me know. It will be free to join, but I will ask for one or two things to get access, so stay tuned on how you can get in for free in another video.

Ask Dave #27: "What's The Best Way To Make Kombucha With Chia Seeds?"

This question comes in from Linda. Linda is, and I am sure many of you have seen this, right, the chia seed kombucha. For those that don't know what chia seeds are, most people think it's just a nutrient dense great way to get some omegas and a great way for fiber, right, and protein, but another nice thing about chia seeds if you do it correctly, which you'll learn in a second, is it's an emollient. 

Not only will it, sometimes when we take fiber, yeah, fiber will kind of keep us clean, but it does so in an aggressive way, and things like aloe vera and chia seeds if done properly will act as an emollient, so it will not only help with getting stuff out, but it will also soothe your digestive tract along the way.

Kombucha + Chia Seeds = A Love Affair

What a great combination. 

I did not invent this. 

I have two little hacks for you to make it even better, but whoever did was just a genius because you're taking the power of living probiotics and you're combining it with an emollient that kind of slows down the digestive process because it kind of will create almost like a gel, that emollient function. 

As you've seen in my other videos, kombucha kind of supercharges whatever goes along for the ride. That's why we have our kombucha boosters and other products that kind of take advantage of that. 

I call kombucha a vehicle, and then your ingredients when you add it, whether it's a booster or when you add it to your secondary fermentation when you go to bottle, those are the passengers inside that vehicle that just go along for the ride.

Let's Get Into It

The question was how do you make it and how do you make it stay suspended through the bottle? There's some things we can do and some things we can't do. 

The commercial bottling companies, they have their own kind of in-house techniques, possibly adding some stuff that they might not even say on the label, so it may or may not be exactly like the store bought kind, but that's okay, because it's going to be your kind, which is always better. 

You'll get more pride and more participation in our health and wellness.

If you go online and you start searching this stuff, you'll see here in the comments of our Inner Circle group, "Here's what I do. When you add the chia seeds, it needs to be stirred a lot until the chia absorbs some liquid. Otherwise they stick together. Once they're plump, they just float." "They settled on the bottom. Maybe I did not add enough." "It will be interesting to see Dave's video." The Inner Circle is a lot more active and it's smaller, so I get to have a more intimate relationship with the people inside. Always wanted to try fermenting, came in for Dave's video. Cool, and hemp seeds too. Yeah, hemp seeds are awesome. Hemp seeds are a little easier.

Let Your Cha Cha Cha Chia Soak

The chia seeds, there's a few things that's going on here. The number one thing is we want the chia seeds to be absorbed. They're like a sponge, so the first thing to do, and this is what everyone if you Google it will say, soak the chia seeds in water. 

Usually the ratio is ... Someone is calling me, let's pause that. 

Okay, good grief, guys. My wife has been trying to call me for like the last forty minutes. My phone is literally a foot away from me, but the ringer was off from last night not wanting to wake up the baby, and I did not turn it back on. 

Here we go. 

Yeah, you want to soak the chia seeds first. You want it to create a gel-like substance. You'll know it when you see it for sure. Then you want to experiment with the amount, but usually it's about I believe a tablespoon per one cup. If you want to do four tablespoons, add four cups of water. Now that's a traditional way of doing it when you first add it. Here are some tips. Again, these are generic tips you can find anywhere on the Internet. You want the water to be warmer. In general, warmer things are easier to penetrate when we absorb things, so it's just like if you were soaking any seed or any beans, you usually if you do a warmer temperature, it's going to get in there and hydrate faster.

General Tip: Stir Your Seeds

Here's the thing though, and then also another generic general tip you can find anywhere on the Internet is stir it. You want to stir it and make sure all the seeds are kind of suspended, and then let it sit five minutes and stir it again, let it sit, and then let it sit overnight. I mean, you really want this water to get into the seeds. The thing is if you don't, then it might have the opposite effect. 

It might have a drying effect because these seeds are meant to absorb, right, so think of it this way. If you take a sponge and you place it in water, a lot of water, it's like completely soaked, it's going to hydrate the things that it touches. If you take that sponge and you start wiping your kitchen countertop, the kitchen countertop is going to be clean and will be hydrated so to speak, right? The water from the sponge will be transferred to the countertop.

Now let's reverse it. 

If we took a sponge that was not hydrated at all and was dry, and the countertop was a little wet, it will have the opposite effect. The sponge would then absorb any liquid, so that's a great way to think about it. When you're ingesting chia seeds without hydrating it, the chia seeds need to get hydrated somewhere, so if they don't get hydrated externally, they're going to go into your tract and absorb the liquids that you have, which is a drying effect, so we don't want to do that. 

You always want to hydrate, plus kombucha in general is an astringent liquid and could have some drying properties, mild, but it is on the yang side of the TCM, you know yin and yang. We definitely want to hydrate our chia seeds, over-hydrate. I'm telling you, this stuff is like crazy hydration if you give it hydration to absorb.

Stay Tuned For Part 2... where I reveal the number one thing you can do to enhance your chia seeds so that you get twice as much hydration and triple the amount of deliciousness!

Those are kind of the general rules of thumb. 

Completely hydrate the chia seeds before adding it to your bottle. 

Warmer water and stirring and a longer amount of time will ensure a better jelly-like substance, and then go ahead and add it to your kombucha. 

This is already a little long video, so tomorrow I am going to share with you the advanced tips and tricks, the innovations, the things that I pride myself on in kind of hacking the status quo and always trying to improve and innovate. 

Stay tuned for tomorrow's video.

Happy Brewin',
Dave "Chia Seed" Lindenbaum
The Original Kombucha Starter Kit (Over 16,000 Sold!)
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About Author: 
Dave Lindenbaum

Founder of Get Kombucha and the creator of the Kombucha Continuous Brewing Kit which has helped over 3,700 kombucha brewers from around the world make twice as much kombucha in half the time since 2006.  

He is a loving husband, a mediocre dodgeball player, and a pretty amazing karaoke singer.

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