Meet Your Friendly Neighborhood Kombucha Brewer.

Hey, I’m Nola, the person behind the bubbling glass jars and the sour drink everyone loved at the Samstagsmarkt. I’m the weirdo who decided that basic iced tea wasn’t exciting enough—so I started fermenting it into tangy, fizzy, probiotic chaos and selling it on tap. That’s right: I’m a small-batch kombucha brewer, and yes, I chose this trade on purpose.

It All Started at a Flea Market...

Like many great (and slightly questionable) ideas, this one began while shopping at a flea market/craft fair. The type where you walk around and haggle for old stuff, buy some great art and look at some of that and think, “I could do that and I could do it better”.  Some young women that looked like they were happily living that van life were proudly serving a room temperature brown murky liquid that smelled like gym socks and tasted like vinegar married a mushroom. The price was sliding scale of course. I politely declined but watched as some brave costumers politely took a sip. I watched in horror.

It was very “Kombucha Girl Meme” energy—if you know, you know. First sip: absolute betrayal. Second sip: huh… maybe?? Third sip: “Okay, I don’t hate it, but also what IS this?”

Let’s get real, most food and alcoholic drinks go through a pretty disgusting process to become the deliciously enjoyable final product. Kombucha is no different. When made well and with skill, the final result…just so good.  I decided I would do kombucha better and…I do.

Why Kombucha?

Kombucha has been around for literally thousands of years. Some trace it back to ancient China, where it was known as the “tea of immortality” (Bold claim, but okay.) Others say it made its way through Russia and Eastern Europe, picking up mysterious origins and names like a culinary cryptid.

To this day, no one really knows who said, “You know what this tea needs? A jellyfish-like blob of bacteria and yeast floating in it”. But I salute them. And I salute you, if you’ve ever made eye contact with a SCOBY and still drank the kombucha anyway.

Why I Brew (So You Don’t Have To)

Let’s be honest—brewing kombucha is not for the faint of heart. It takes patience, a weird tolerance for vinegar smells, and the ability to answer questions like “What is that floating in the jar?” with a straight face.

One of the reasons I started brewing is so that others wouldn’t have to go through what I did: confusing instructions, failed batches, questionable jars of “what used to be tea” and more than one exploding bottle. I wanted to make fresh, delicious, actually enjoyable kombucha available on tap, made with love and flavors that don’t taste like a dare.

SCOBY: The Pet That Makes You Drink Weird Tea

Let’s talk about the SCOBY—aka the Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast. It’s the living organism that turns sweet tea into kombucha, and it looks like someone Sponge Bob should be friends with. Slimy, floppy, gelatinous, and a little terrifying, the SCOBY is the heart and soul of every brew. It also kind of smells like old apple cider got into a bar fight.

My first SCOBY was a gift from a friend in Phoenix. SCOBY traveled with me here to Germany. I quickly had a broken fridge with no door in my kitchen as my new kombucha cabinet filled with jars. The jars changed to 50 liter bins in my studio apartment. The smell of sweet kombucha vinegar was so strong my cleaning lady actually quit…and now we have our beautiful, clean, and ventilated commercial kitchen and kombucha microbrewery. (or microscopic brewery as I like to call it.) The rest is, mildly fermented history.