Some restaurants like Chipotle in Texas are serving booch on tap, while bars in L.A. and New York City are shaking up kombucha-infused cocktails. Better yet, booch that is actually hooch: Booch breweries like the New York City-based Beyond Kombucha and Michigan’s Unity Vibration are making real alcoholic beer out of kombucha. Unity even brews a gluten-free Triple Goddess beer by fermenting kombucha with organic dried hops and a variety of fresh fruits. The booch bedlam doesn’t end there: Packaged products are getting in on the trend, too, evinced by kombucha sorbet and the recently launched Reed’s Culture Club Coffee Kombucha, which uses a coffee base instead of tea and tastes like subtly sweet and fizzy cold brew. Target also started carrying Live Kombucha Soda in flavors that mimic brands like Dr. Pepper at 1,500 of its stores last September. MORE: 4 Things To Know Before Ever Ordering Cold Brew Coffee “One cool thing about kombucha is that it relies on a very flexible fermentation technology,” says Hannah Crum, co-founder of Kombucha Brewers International, the industry’s first trade group. “It can be applied to many different substrates. Basically, you just add a starter culture of bacteria and yeast (called a SCOBY, or symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast) to a beverage—typically tea, but not always—with a bit of sugar or fruit juice and let it sit for at least a week.” Beyond beer and the other funky new booch products, Crum also expects the industry to expand in another way: Following in the footsteps of craft beer, kombucha tourism has hit. “Some breweries are actually starting to open up tap rooms and give tours.” In addition to the two breweries mentioned above, these include Humm Kombucha in Bend, Oregon, and Urban Farm Fermentory in Portland, Maine. Ready to tap the trend? Just keep a few things to keep in mind before you start chugging, says Crum. While traditional kombucha is naturally low in sugar (e.g. GT’s Enlightened Original Raw Kombucha has 2 g per 8 oz), some companies are jacking up the sweet factor with fruit juices or cane sugar to appeal to mainstream tastes. There are also a few shelf-stable kombuchas entering the market, which may not have the same naturally occurring probiotics or B vitamins as raw unpasteurized varieties. Alright, enough with the talk, time to go taste. For our editors’ favorite kombucha brands, stay tuned for our taste-test results later this month. MORE: Kombucha: Wonderful or a Big Waste of Money?
