It's been a season of changes for the small-scale brewing company Flo Ko Kombucha. Vice-president Ryan Hourihan and owner Danielle Black. (Photo: Submitted)
It’s been a season of changes for a small-scale kombucha brewing company based in Fredericton.
Flourish Kombucha has moved from brewing 20 or 40 litres of kombucha at one time up to 600 litres.
Owner Danielle Black had never heard of kombucha four or five years ago when she was living in Sussex. But after attending a fermentation workshop in Moncton, she started out by brewing a gallon in her parents’ kitchen.
“My favourite thing about kombucha is you can make it taste however you want,” she said.
Kombucha is a slightly fizzy fermented drink made from tea with sweet or sour flavours depending on the recipe.
Black said there’s a laundry list of anecdotal evidence of kombucha benefits that people have said it helps with by consuming it regularly.
Some claims about the health benefits of drinking kombucha range from probiotics which could improve gut health, as well as a substitute for drinks like pop because of its fizz, or an added energy kickstarter due to the caffeine content from the tea.
Vice-president Ryan Hourihan said he wasn’t sure they would have been able to scale up and move into a brewery without the lighter demands due to the pandemic. He said it’s allowed them time to iron out wrinkles on the larger process to tackle higher demand.
“With all the research we’ve done dozens of kombucha producers when scaling up have a tendency to have exceptions they have to make on the quality of their product, and we’re really happy that although there was a lot of trial and error involved, our finished product on the 600 litres scale actually ended up at least as good if not better,” he said.
That scaling up has come in leaps and bounds. The kombucha was first sold by the bottle out of a cooler in front of a market. She moved on to attending the Fredericton Boyce Farmers Market and selling products there. Now, Milltown Roasters has two of her flavours on tap and word of mouth from customers has increased demand both online and at in-person events.
The company is also planning on canning their larger batches instead of using bottles. A problem with using glass swing-top bottles in fermentation is glass bottles can explode or pop regularly.
“We had to pick four kinds of staple favours for our line of cans so we’re actually going to, instead of doing bottling or anything like that we actually decided to go with cans for our large batches because they’re just more sustainable in almost every way,” said Black.
The four flavours of kombucha will include gingerade, raspberry lemonade, zen, which is a combination of strawberry, ginger, lemon, lime with infusions of lemongrass and lime leaf. The winter flavour will be chicory chai and will be switched out for a summer flavour.
Black said she’s easily brewed over fifty flavours of kombucha but couldn’t justify 10 or 12 labels so they chose the ones with the most response and demand from customers.
The biggest change to come for this company might actually be the name. Black said the corporation name is Flourish Brewing Company, but Flourish Beverages is taken by someone in Alberta.
“Essentially we’re formerly known as Flourish Kombucha right now and the new name is going to be Flo Ko Kombucha, It’s basically the J.Lo of kombuchas,” said Hourihan.
Flo Ko Kombucha is available for sale online through social media as well as at Milltown Roasters.
