Is Tea Beer the Next Evolutional Step of Craft Beer?

, Is Tea Beer the Next Evolutional Step of Craft Beer?

 

While living in Los Angeles I have met several famous people in the most random of places, frequently through the improv and comedy community. I recently took an improv class at a well know improv training center that randomly had the founder of Honest Tea, Barry Nalebluff, as one of my classmates. He told me about his new venture, Kombrecha, a tea beer company. I was a little skeptical whether the highly fermented kombucha could actually be considered beer to begin with After all, it’s not brewed by the German Reinheitsgebot where beer is made with water, barley, hops, and yeast. But then I thought, “This isn’t GermanCraftBeer.com, this is AmericanCraftBeer.com, damn it! Merica!” I agreed to meet Barry so he could prove my skepticism wrong at the most American of restaurants: Sushi Stop.

Barry founded Honest Tea in 1998 because he wanted to drink a non-alcoholic beverage that was normal. Water is boring, soda is candy in a can, diet drinks are cancer in a can, and Snapple is basically soda without the bubbles. He went to India by luck and discovered that you can get great tea for a nickel a cup, so there is no excuse that we should not be able to drink amazing tea at a decent price.

When he got back to “Merica” he got a call from his star student, Seth Goldman (Barry is also a professor at Yale who taught strategy, innovation and now negotiation), and Goldman asked Barry, “Whatever happened to his idea about a low-calorie normal beverage?” Barry wanted to practice what he preached at Yale so they made a tea that was just a tad sweet and created Honest Tea.

, Is Tea Beer the Next Evolutional Step of Craft Beer?

I mentioned in previous articles that my second beverage of choice behind beer is tea. I drink gallons of tea a week and apparently it shows because Barry said I have the complexion of a 25 year old. After I blushed and giggled like a school girl I started to realize that I might be able get on board with this tea beer concept.

Honest Tea made a product called Honest Kombucha and Barry thought this was the best product that they sold. The kombucha business was booming from health nuts to hippies and every other type of person between, until Lindsay Lohan got her hands on kombucha. She claimed that her alcohol monitoring was broken from drinking kombucha which people believed for some reason. The FDA flexed their bureaucratic muscles so hard that their rule-laden hemorrhoids exploded with regulatory puss as they tested the alcohol content of Honest Kombucha. Every bottle that was tested was over the legal limit to be considered non-alcoholic of 0.5%. Thus sparked “The Great Kombucha Crisis of 2009” where the FDA pulled it off the market for six months.

, Is Tea Beer the Next Evolutional Step of Craft Beer?

Barry and Seth sold Honest Tea outright to Coca-Cola in 2011, but Barry still had the desire to brew kombucha. The trick to making this yeast and bacteria beverage is trying to make it stable at 0.5%. This beverage is alive, it’s not pasteurized, and the yeast continues to turn sugar into alcohol after it’s bottled. Even though the brew is at 0.4% when it leaves the factory, by the time it’s on the shelves for a couple weeks it’s above 0.5%. So as they say in software, “Take a bug and turn it into a feature.” Barry and Seth decided to let kombucha free and let it go the way that it wants to go, which is naturally to 2% ABV. Kombrewcha was born and now the world has a genuine authentic tasting kombucha and tea beer.

Getting the right recipe was their next big challenge. Seth and Barry’s theory that kombucha should taste good was their main motivator. A lot of kombucha was made for the Birkenstock generation that thinks if it doesn’t taste like medicine, then it’s not good for you. Much like my grandma telling me the secret to rid a sore throat was to swallow a spoon full of kerosene, this theory is a bunch of hog wash poppycock that needs to get its loafers off the davenport.  It took Seth and Barry over a year and over a hundred different recipes to play with the different variables to figure out the best sugar, tea, bacteria, and yeast combo along with fruits and spices to get their four flagship brews: Original, Royal Ginger, Lemongrass Lime, and Blackberry Hibiscus.

, Is Tea Beer the Next Evolutional Step of Craft Beer? 

Tea Beer should appeal to a large range of people. At 65 calories and 2% ABV It’s highly sessionable, so you can drink a lot of it without packing on the pounds or getting tossed. It’s also a great hair of the dog drink, a good mixer, it’s gluten free, and has an amazing flavor. For the few beers out there that are in the sub-70 calorie range, Barry likes to ask a question: “How is light beer like making love on a beach? It’s fucking too close to water.”

Kombrewcha has the probiotics of yogurt, the antioxidants of tea, and a delicious flavor… but is this beer?

The TTB considers it a beer and Kombrewcha has to be distributed by beer distributors. It’s brewed like beer, except with tea and agave nectar instead of hops and malts. Kombrewcha is brewed at a sub-contracting brewery even though Seth and Barry had a hard time finding a brewery that would take them in because the bacterium in kombucha causes beer to go sour.

I had the Original and the Royal Ginger and I thought they both tasted great. I don’t think it tasted like a beer that I’m used to, but I personally don’t think sours taste like any beer that I usually drink either. As a matter of fact, some could argue that tea beer is a type of sour or even the next step beyond a sour beer because of the similar yeast and bacteria used in the brewing process.

, Is Tea Beer the Next Evolutional Step of Craft Beer?

Kombrewcha isn’t the only tea beer on the market: Beyond Brewing Company crafts artisan kombucha and probiotic beers and are featured in New York gastropubs. And the Michigan based brewery Unity Vibration sells their Kombucha Beer nationwide. Kombucha is a $500 million market and there is no reason why Kombrewcha can’t have $100 million in sales. Seth and Barry are just tapping into this undiscovered part of the market as they’re currently distributing to New York and they just started distributing to Los Angeles.

The spirit of the craft beer drinker is to experiment, try new things, and to drink around. Barry would like Kombrewcha to be in your rotation. I plan to have it in mine when it’s distributed to more locations in LA.

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