I love pickles. Dill pickles, kosher dill pickles, cornichons, full-sour pickles, half-sour pickles, quarter-sour pickles, quick pickles, gherkins, German senfgurken. Not bread and butter pickles. Those are not pickles. The flaccid, round slices with their fluorescent yellow tint and sickeningly sweet flavor are a disgrace to the pickle name.
I’m the person sitting next to you, asking impatiently if you’re going to eat your pickle. I order sandwiches just to get the pickle on the side. I volunteer at marathons, handing out pickle juice to runners: one for them, two for me. Sometimes (all the time) I drink pickle juice straight from the jar.
I also love kombucha, but unlike pickles, which I have been consuming with delight since I sprouted teeth, kombucha and I had a rocky start. About 10 years ago, I decided to care about my gut biome because someone in my office said that I should. He recommended kombucha because of its probiotics. I didn’t know what a gut biome was, but I imagined it at the bottom of my stomach, like a shallow wading pool with a fountain. Instead of pennies for good luck, I would toss in “live and active cultures.”
My co-worker, who made his own kombucha, brought the “mother” to the office to share with me, so I, too, could make my own at home. If you haven’t met “mother” (also known as SCOBY: Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast), it is a gelatinous, snotty, slimy disk that resembles something an alien might’ve barfed up or recently given birth to. Or both. We don’t know how aliens give birth.
“Mother” is also quite temperamental. One wrong move and it grows fuzzy gray mold that could possibly kill you. I did not trust myself to keep “mother” happy, so I headed to the store to buy some uncontaminated kombucha. My first sip was followed by a theatrical spit take. Convinced that I got unlucky with an expired batch, I tried it again a few days later with the same results. Then it dawned on me that it was supposed to taste like fruit rotting in your mouth, with some weak fizz to distract you.
Being a Taurus, I’m nothing if not persistent, so I kept drinking kombucha until disgust turned into tolerance and eventually an obsession. I couldn’t get enough of those live and active cultures.
This brings us to last week at Whole Foods, where I discovered the holy union of my two loves in 365 Organic Pickle Kombucha. Together at last — a dream I never knew I had. Some may find the beverage’s pale green hue with dark green sediment unappetizing, but pickle juice lovers will be pleased with its resemblance to an unclean ocean.
I grabbed the bottle and immediately twisted open the cap. I was rewarded with a satisfying hiss. I stuck my nose in it and sniffed, like a proper kombucha connoisseur, getting a faint whiff of dill but not a lot of pickle. I took a sip, excited for the puckering acidity of pickle juice with the stinky rotten undertones typical of kombucha, but I got neither. My mouth was confused.
The 365 Organic Pickle Kombucha has pickle tendencies, but it tastes like I had (poorly) described pickles to someone who had never eaten a pickle nor seen a cucumber, and then they reverse-engineered it into a perfume, and sprayed that perfume directly into my mouth.
I walked home in a green cloud of disillusionment with a chemical dill aftertaste lingering on my tongue. But perhaps I rushed my judgment, and it needed to sit for a bit; after all, my love for kombucha wasn’t instant. It took me a solid five years to be able to choke it down without throwing up a little.
A few days later, I opened the bottle again, this time with subdued expectations. The kombucha was less enthusiastic as well. The swampy sediment settled to the bottom; the fizz had lost its exuberance. I took a tentative sip. The dill travesty violated my taste buds. This was not a holy union. This dream was a nightmare. There was only one thing I could do.
I grabbed an emergency pickle jar from my pantry and downed its brine in one sitting. Then I chased it with a growler of pineapple jalapeño kombucha. Now that hit the spot.
Viktoria Shulevich, a Boston-based writer of humor, essays and children’s fiction, has written for the New Yorker, McSweeney’s and WBUR’s Cognoscenti.
