“Namaste,” is what I toasted with taking my first sip of high alcohol kombucha at a beer festival down in San Diego a few months ago. I, like many others, had never heard of alcoholic kombucha, and the myriad of questions I had bumbling through my head showed how ignorant I was about it. “Will this make me have to poop?” was one thought. Being at a beer event two hours away from home without a change of clothes, taking a sip of boozy booch had me tight with trepidation. But if my gut can hold the plethora of sour beers, west coast IPA’s, and bourbon barrel aged barley wines I consumed thus far, I should be fine. “There’s probably a Target nearby,” I thought.
“Will this make me achieve a higher level of consciousness?” I asked the booch-booth person. “Maybe your mouth will,” she replied, and so I sipped through each tap, actually enjoying them. Each flavor was like a breath of fresh air at a beer festival. Flavor combos hit hard like apple-jasmine-lime or turmeric-tangerine-ginger; they all have something in common: blend a sweet, a tart, and a spice into a gut-warming cocktail of deliciousness. None of them taste anything like beer, or cider, for that matter.
Thanks to a huge new 18,000-foot brewery expansion, Boochcraft is now canning their raw, organic, gluten-free boozy kombucha and shipping them throughout the state.
Alcoholic kombucha takes the traditional approach to brewing up a batch with a culture of yeast and bacteria that ferments sugary water over a couple of weeks. To make it boozy, they then add more sugar and traditional yeast to achieve a level 7% ABV across all of their products. All fair trade and organic ingredients are used to create the flavors, and each can is packed with probiotics and some degree of actual nutrition, which may actually help your gut.
Will it make you poop? Maybe because they’re so tasty.
Boochcraft can be found at Alta Baja Market or Check out Boochcraft at boochcraft.com
Greg Nagel has been writing about beer since 2011, is an avid homebrewer of wine, cider, and beer, is a certified Cicerone Beer Server, level 1 WSET in Wine, a podcaster with the Four Brewers Show, and runs a yearly beer festival called Firkfest happening on June 29th in Anaheim!