The Truby Story & Caucasus Kefir Journal

September 2016, a hostel in Skopje, North Macedonia. A Japanese poet, a dreamer travelling the world, and Simao, who was chasing the origins of yogurt, began a once-in-a-lifetime conversation.

"What do you think matters most in life?" the dreamer asked. The poet didn't hesitate for half a second: "Love. If you'll forget something in six months, it clearly wasn't important. Anything that has nothing to do with love fades with time."

"Truby!" flashed through Simao's mind. In Russian, "ty" means you and "lyubi" means love — said together, "love you". That was the answer the boys had found.

On 8 June 2018, guided by local historian Dmitry, the Truby expedition reached a university that had just turned 100 in the Republic of Alania, North Caucasus, and visited Professor Boris of the wild microbial culture lab.

The professor had a secret room, its shelves lined with fermenting jars. "Every bottle here stands for a student. When students join the lab, I ask them to collect cultures from the wild and brew three bottles. When they graduate, they take one, give one to me, and leave one in this room."

Earlier, in September 2016, on a train from Romania to Bulgaria, the seat opposite was taken by Wolfgang, a lively 96-year-old German and retired geography teacher. He loved Bulgarian yogurt and German bread, and his mother still lived on the family farm in Germany. Before getting off, he wrote down his name and a very short address.

Abkhazia, on the eastern shore of the Black Sea, shares Taiwan's subtropical climate and, like Taiwan, sits between great powers. Long ago, shepherds in the North Caucasus carried fresh milk down the mountains in leather pouches; sunshine and swaying slowly turned it into a delicious fermented milk — kefir.

With industrialisation, fermented milk came to be made from starter powders, gums and flavourings, and the original kefir grains were slowly forgotten. Our first attempt to reach Abkhazia in 2016 ended at the border. In 2018 we set out again, collecting native kefir grains deep in the Caucasus, exchanging cultures for research with the laboratory of the Head of the Microbiology Department at Moscow State University, and bringing several precious kefir grain strains back to the National Taiwan University Department of Animal Science and Technology lab for further research.

In Ossetia, North Caucasus, we found native kefir handed down through village families — delicious and gently mellow, never sharp — and heard elders describe traditional methods that had almost been lost.

In August 2016, our two-man team, Weidi and Simao, were stopped at Budapest airport because of their passports. Simao handed a year of planning to Weidi: "It's all up to you now!" Weidi made it to Tbilisi but could not enter the country and spent two days stuck at the airport. The plan was over.

Back in Taiwan, Simao kept messaging seasoned travellers for a legal way in. In June 2018, the expedition travelled west to east along the 1,100-km Caucasus range in search of native grains.

In the village of Arasazikh in Abkhazia, we found no grains — but we tasted a lightly fermented loquat juice that was wonderful. We remembered that taste and promised to bring the flavours of the region home. In 2021, Black Sea Tonic was born: water, brown sugar and kefir cultures fermented together, with a date-like richness and notes of apricot and wild berries.