Editors note: This publication contains a lightly edited transcript of the question and answer portion of the corresponding lecture.

Image attribution: “Kombucha In Gärgläsern von Original-Kombucha.de” - Original-kombucha, (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Q + A:

Question: We are curious about your experiment with the tea, the kombucha, and the participants who helped you with that. Were you able to get that information back to them, the people who swabbed their hands?

Athena: Yeah, so when people swabbed their hands, we gave them a card that had information about our lab twitter account, the Aktipis Lab, and we actually posted pictures over the coming weeks about how each of the kombuchas were looking. We also posted a blog post about what is kombucha so that we could keep that communication with the public open.

Question: What's the main difference between the critters in kombucha versus water kefir versus ginger bug?

Athena: In my microbial family at the moment, I don't have any kefir or ginger bug. But I can say that kombucha is very different from the fermentations that are more sort of based on dairy products. Kombucha doesn't have Lactobacillus in it, and Lactobacillus is usually the dominant microbe in any dairy based fermentation. So, my yogurt, it doesn't like my kombucha. I don't mix them as they're not the same microbial populations.

But I will confess that the way that I started my sourdough was with an inoculation from my kombucha and then of course whatever else landed in it then populated it as well, but that's how I initially started my sourdough. And in the early stages, before it matured, it made the best pizza dough I've ever had. So if you're looking to make some quick and easy pizza dough, I think a little kombucha with your typical pizza dough components is pretty good.