It's never too early to introduce your kids to pierogi

The Willy Street Coop is putting on a kids cooking class tomorrow where they'll make pierogi.

 

 

It's never too early to introduce your kids to the Polish delectation.

Foraging in Fitchburg: Blackberry Grape Kombucha by Forage Kombucha

Having sampled all of the Soul Brews available to me, I looked once again to Madison for more kombucha to taste and blather on about. I had intended to dig into the brews of Rude Brew Kombucha but they were no longer on the shelves at the Willy Street Coop or, at least the one on the north side. I would swear I've seen their teas there in the past couple months but there wasn't even an empty bit of shelf space with a sticker giving the prices of the absent brews. Their website is gone as the domain has expired. Does it still exist?

And so I perused the shelves in search of another local kombucha and came upon the teas of Forage which is brewed by our neighbors to the south in Fitchburg, a suburb of Madison.

Forage puts their teas into lovely, colorful cans and taking one from the shelf and laying it in my basket made me feel like I was going to abscond with a bit of summer, as if one can put sunny skies, sweltering heat, and road construction into a can.

I went with their Blackberry Grape for no particular reason. I suspect that it was at either side of the shelf and I decided to start at that end and make my way to the other.

The tea was a hazy light purple. Its aroma smelled tangy sour, at first, and then my nose was greeted by blackberry followed by something I can only characterize as an indistinct fruitiness. I smelled fruit but I couldn't really discern which ones. Finally there was a tad of the floral. Certainly not a bad start.

Taking a sip, I found it had some really nice fizz to it with a light body and not much sweetness. A firm tang was accompanied by a herbal tea taste, a mellow fruitiness, and another tad of the floral. Normally I don't look at the ingredients list until I am done sampling but there are times when I look at it mid-tasting. Such was the case here.

I was not surprised to see hibiscus near the top of the list. So that's where that floral taste comes from. I was, however, surprised to see red wine grape skins & blackberry flavor towards the bottom as well as the fact that genuine blackberries were absent. (Same with lychee - "flavor" only.) Closer to the front of the line were currants, schisandra, and guayusa. What the heck are schisandra, and guayusa?

Schisandra is a climbing vine that Wikipedia says is native to North America and I presume its fruit was used here. Guayusa, on the other hand, is an Amazonian holly tree whose leaves are used to prepare a tea.

The finish was fairly dry in a tanniny way and I was able to taste the lychee flavor. I also tasted herbal tea and a hint of hibiscus in addition to a general fruitiness that lingered.

With all the fruits and the flavors, the two types of tea (black and green), and those exotic berries & leaves, I was rather surprised that everything seemed to be in balance. There wasn't really any single flavor that stood out; instead it made for a nice gestalt. It was also not particularly sweet, which I really appreciated. The fizz was the perfect amount, there was a very nice tanginess to it, and this brew had a tasty fruity-botanical combination. Oh, and there was no SCOBY.

My gripe is, that for a drink that is touted as organic and probiotic, whose maker always uses "pure ingredients", and, in general, is touted as natural and healthy, the use of blackberry flavor and lychee flavor is disappointing. I much prefer that real fruit be used. (Do these flavorings come from Amoretti?) I find is disingenuous to put blackberries on your label when you only use blackberry flavor.

I meet Alesia Miller. She's into mangos too.: Ginger Mango Peach by Soul Brew Kombucha

Having been suitably impressed by Soul Brew's BLM, I returned to the Willy Street Co-op to grab another of their flavors. While scanning the cooler I noticed that they also carried Rude Brew Kombucha, a brand from here in Madison. I knew there was another kombuchaery in town! They're next. Probably.

As I noted previously, the Co-op - at least the northside branch - has three flavors from Soul Brew. I stood there staring at the cooler trying to decide which one to try next when I had the bright idea of just buying both of the flavors I'd not yet had. This time around I chose Ginger Mango Peach because it was the only one of the three that wasn't red/purple. Alesia Miller must be a fan of the mango as this was the second of her brews to feature it.

I thought that BLM was brewed with real fruit and so was surprised to see that there is none here. Instead fruit flavored teas are used. This doesn't mean that, say, dried fruits weren't used in those teas but that vision of fresh fruit bathing in Miller's kombucha with ginger bath balls is just a fantasy.

This tea was a hazy yellow and it looked like there were bits of pulp inside. But since fruit isn't a part of the recipe, what did I see? Speaking of seeing, I saw the SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) inside the bottle and wondered how kombucha brewers get a perfectly portioned bit of SCOBY in every bottle. And why is the glob of fermenting goodness always round?

Lastly, I'll note that there was a fair number of bubbles inside.

A vinegar tang was prominent on the nose while the fruity aromas seemed to be mainly of mango and peach.

Unsurprisingly I got a healthy dose of fizz on my first sip. Not as much as with the BLM but more than other brands of kombucha I've tasted. Beneath that I could taste the herbal goodness of the black and green teas followed by mango, ginger, and peach. My tongue got a little bite of tannin when I swallowed along with lemon, green tea, and a hint of mint.

As with BLM, this stuff should be consumed after warming up a tad. This allows the lemon and mint to come out on the zesty finish and gives the fruity flavors their chance to become more prominent overall. I really enjoyed this kombucha and adored how the herbal tea flavors melded with the fruity ones. Plus the sweetness was nicely restrained.

While I'm on the topic of sweetness, the bottle says "no added sugar" while cane sugar is the fourth ingredient. I mean, the SCOBY needs something to eat, right? So I am unsure what the "no added sugar" is supposed to convey here. Is this stuff highly attenuated with all the sugar getting gobbled up and no sugar is added after fermentation?

Regardless, another winner here from Soul Brew. A nice tang, generally balanced fruit flavors, and just the perfect amount of fizz. Plus the lemon-mint on the finish was icing on the cake. I loved that little zip at the end.

This brew's got soul and it's super bad

Having finished sampling NessAlla's regular flavors, i.e. - non-mocktail kombuchas, I wasn't sure where to turn next. While I suspect that there is at least one other brand of the tasty tea fermented here in Madison, I did not see it at Woodman's. However, on a stop at the Willy Street Co-op, I noticed Soul Brew in their cooler and remembered seeing their stand at the South Shore Farmers' Market back in 2022. I had some back then and I recalled finding it tasty.

I am not sure if it was Soul Brew's founder, Alesia Miller, was at the stand that morning or not. Miller is the first black woman in Wisconsin to found a kombuchaery and likely one of the first in the country. She founded Soul Brew in 2019 about a year after making her first batch at home. In an interview from 2022 in Milwaukee's alt-weekly(?), Shepherd Express, Miller said "My initial target was Black and brown people, to help them understand how kombucha can help with issues like diabetes and gut health." Miller's targeting of minority communities was a common theme in the articles I found.

In a profile by a local Milwaukee TV station:

She admits kombucha is sometimes a hard sell in the black community.

"With Soul Brew, I am like how can I mix the worlds, make it delicious, make it approachable and try and educate individuals that would never do it... I think I represent the community in a way that they are able to see somebody that looks like them," Miller says.

Hopefully she had made inroads with black and brown communities but I haven't found any articles where this is addressed. Best of luck to her.

The first Soul Brew flavor I sampled, to review, that is, was BLM - Blackberry Lemon Mango.

I think this is also my first review to feature a photo taken with my new phone. Just look at all those extra megapixels!

The tea was light red and a tad hazy. There were plenty of bubbles inside. A sniff caught a strong tanginess with a nebulous fruitiness just behind. I think my nose also sniffed a bit of tea too.

My first sip revealed some hefty fizz followed by a lovely dose of tanginess. The fruit flavor was rather mild initially but grew as the brew warmed. I tasted mostly blackberry and lemon. This stuff had a real zip to it and my tongue was left with tangy bite marks on it. The lemon really came through on the finish.

This was excellent kombucha! If I had a gripe, it would be that it was just a bit overly fizzy. Still, I appreciated that the sweetness was kept in check even as it warmed to cellar temperature. It occurs to me that Miller takes a different approach from NessAlla. Most of the NessAlla brews I sampled had a sweet taste to them even if they didn't have a lot of added sugars. I think this is because they temper the tang and forego a lot of fizz.

Soul Brew, on the other hand, lets the acetic acid flow and offers bubbles aplenty. This kombucha leaned more towards the tangy and so had a better balance of tea and fruit.

Great tea but I've only seen it at the Co-op and they have only three flavors. Maybe these are all that Soul Brew offers in the bowels of winter.