My mom had been brewing kombucha for my brothers and sister and I so I picked up the brewing skills (and scoby) from her. A friend, Joann Kim, asked me to participate in a church basement food fair called the Greenpoint Food Market and I had a bunch of this kombucha stuff laying around so I thought, "Why not? At the time, I was making kombucha for myself and increasingly more and more for friends,
showing people how to brew, that sort of hippy thing. I started having fun playing around with artwork and labels and fermenting different teas and tea blends and people seemed to like what I was doing, all except for one of my first customers who dropped a salient comment bomb on the food market's blog saying Mombucha tasted like "hipster Vitamin Water." What a jerk. Fast forward to 2013 and with the help of some very talented and sympathetic friends/Mombucha addicts, we managed to bring this "Breaking Bad" style Kombucha brewing production out from it's humble tinkerings to it's own commercial brewery still located in Greenpoint. While the scale of the operation has increased, the ethos of Mombucha remains intact: We still brew/bottle/label everything by hand. We select the finest natural ingredients we can get our hands on and as locally as possible. We still bike deliveries around town. We still accept the bottles back for discounts on future orders. We're still very open about teaching our process to whomever wishes to learn. The future? Plans within plans. My hope is to set up a national decentralized supply and distribution network; little Mombucha breweries in all the major cities which function as community centers and tea bars. We're testing the concept out now in Greenpoint so let's see how it goes. Thanks for reading and please imbibe with healthy intentions on Mombucha!