GT Dave

I was raised by two very kind of holistic spiritual parents who raised me a vegetarian.

So I was raised with this strong belief of like food can be medicine or food can be poison.

So following that philosophy, my parents brought a lot of weird things into the house from noni juice to aloe vera juice to wheatgrass, tofu, you name it.

But in the early 90s, one of the things that they brought in was this thing called kombucha.

And I remember it very clearly because it was a very defining moment.

My dad came home one day with a kombucha culture, which if you've seen when they're kind of these like rubbery circular pancakes, so to speak.

And he came home with it in a Ziploc bag.

And he goes to my mom and to my brothers, like, hey guys, I'm going to make kombucha tomorrow.

It's called the drink of immortality.

And both of us were like, okay, dad, you're crazy, whatever.

But that next day and every day after that,

I noticed that he became obsessive with making it and drinking it.

And the way he would make it was very pungent.

Like kombucha is pungent on its own, but he would make it incredibly pungent to the point where only him and my mother could stomach it.

I tried and I was like, dad, I love you.

I've tried a lot of the crazy things you brought into this household, but I just can't.

So then fast forward two years later, it just became more and more integrated into the household and then ultimately played a very strong role in my mom's health.

Oh, yeah.

So the way kombucha was introduced to my parents is that because my parents were on that kind of spiritual, holistic health path, kombucha was circulating a little bit in LA.

There was this underground movement of kombucha in the early 90s,