Kombucha, a fermented tea with deep roots as a health tonic in Russia and China, is an acquired taste for some. Even Zoey Shamai, the owner of local kombucha company The Fairy’s Tonic (www.thefairystonic.com), says that she wasn’t a fan the first time she tried it. “I didn’t love the taste; it was odd,” she says. “But then the next day, I had this incredible elimination. It completely cleaned out my system. I had to find out more about it.”

Kombucha is believed to be an excellent detoxification agent and digestive aid, as Shamai’s initial experience suggests. While there haven’t been substantial clinical trials to back up the long list of its proposed benefits, kombucha has been used as a folk remedy for hundreds of years — some say thousands — in Asia and Eastern Europe, where it has been used to improve everything from skin appearance to energy levels. In recent years, the tea has started to become more popular in North America, and commercially prepared brews from companies like The Fairy’s Tonic, GT’s (currently available only in the States) and Wonder Drink are appearing on health-food-store shelves and on the menus of raw-food restaurants like Live.

So what exactly does it taste like? It varies from source to source — and, if you’re making your own, from batch to batch — but it has an acidic taste not unlike diluted, effervescent apple cider vinegar. The Fairy’s Tonic, in particular, has a mild flavour without being overly sweet. I loved it the first time I tried it, but I also used to drink vinegar straight from the bottle and popped entire lemon wedges into my mouth as a kid. Many people, like Shamai, take a while to warm up to it.

For those who get into the drink, the appeal lies in the immediate sensation they feel after trying it. “The biggest difference I noticed was a feeling of lightness,” says Shamai, who was introduced to the tea while living at a yoga community in New Mexico where “there was no booze and no weed, but there was kombucha everywhere.”

She was intrigued. “I loved the way it made me feel. I had more energy and I was able to digest food so much better,” she says. “It’s a raw, living food that’s loaded with digestive enzymes.”

Shamai learned how to make the tea herself and began drinking it every day in 2004. She perfected her technique (she prefers to keep her tea blend as a “trade secret”) and began bottling it for friends, then friends of friends. Soon, the demand grew large enough that she launched her business in 2006. (It’s worth noting that her mother is Ruth of the health-food and supplement line Ruth’s Hemp Foods — one of the forces in making hemp legal in Canada in 1998 — and so it would seem that this kind of entrepreneurial spirit is in her blood.) Shamai is now in the process of expanding her company into a larger industrial kitchen. She’s also introducing three flavours: a light version, a more concentrated one and a ginger flavour, which she says is especially good for digestion.

Anyone can homebrew the drink if you have what is referred to as a SCOBY — an acronym for Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast — a flat pancake-like substance that is often (and misleadingly) called a mushroom. When the SCOBY is added to a mixture of tea and sugar and left to ferment for about three weeks, a number of organic acids and enzymes form. The finished tea has very low sugar and trace alcohol content (reportedly 1 per cent per volume), as well as vitamin B.

There are loads of websites that sell SCOBYs and different types of brewing systems, though you can also just use a large glass jar for brewing and acquire a SCOBY for free or very little through a community message board (a new one forms each time you make a batch).

Of course, food safety is always an issue. Shamai sells a homebrewing kit that includes a SCOBY from her own line as well as a 40-minute hands-on workshop to explain the brewing stages ($108 for one-on-one, or $65 in a group). Shamai says she’s seen individual results vary widely, even with the same cultures.

“It’s mysterious,” she says. “It’s a very magical thing.”