Soul Brew liked my review (enough to reproduce it)

My review of Soul Brew Kombucha's Ginger Mango Peach has been reproduced at the Soul Brew website.

Pretty in pink: Organic Hibiscus Berry Kombucha by Forage

It has taken a while to make this review a reality. I bought and drank several cans of this stuff before actually taking tasting notes during consummation. Thirst would overtake me so I would pop open a can and dispense with my thirst without pen & paper figuring I'd buy another one on my next visit to the grocery store and that I'd review that one. Eventually I put paid to this vicious circle.

The Forage website no longer lists this hibiscus berry stuff. Did tariffs make the acquisition of tropical hibiscus financially untenable? Or perhaps this brew is available only during the colder months? Maybe the brewer just wanted to try their hand at different flavors.

Even if you don't care for the taste of hibiscus, you've got to admit that the reddish pink hue it gives to drinks is sure pretty. The color is provided by a chemical called anthocyanin which, if related to cyanide, is hopefully a benign cousin. This stuff was hazy with the trademark reddish pink. My pour did not produce any head so I figured this would be a fizz-light experience.

The aroma was fruity and floral. I hate to be generic but I am not able to distinguish the floral scents of hibiscus from those of rosehip, another ingredient. As for the fruitiness, it was berry-like but currants and apples come before elderberries and natural blueberry flavor on the ingredients list which also boasts essential orange oil and natural mango flavor further down. On one sniff I thought I caught the blueberry and orange but that may have been purely psychological and merely the result of reading the ingredient list.

Kombucha is tea and so has a light body. Fizziness was mild as expected. The taste was fruity and floral, if you can believe it. There are various fruits and fruit flavorings at play here so there was a fruit punch thing to be had. I think the orange came through as the kombucha warmed. I thoroughly enjoyed the floral flavor and the tartness that hibiscus and rosehip bring as it helped balance the sweetness which was perhaps a bit more than I prefer. It wasn't cloying, mind you.

I really enjoyed this stuff and it reminded me just how tasty hibiscus is. The earliest instance I can recall tasting it goes back to 2011 when Robyn Klinge devised and brewed (or co-brewed) a hibiscus saison that was quite novel to me and very tasty to boot. More recently, I was in Milwaukee and made a stop at Anodyne Coffee where Colombia Rodrigo Sánchez was on tap. The tasting notes mentioned hibiscus - a first in coffee, for me - and it did indeed have a hibiscusy taste.

This brew should satisfy your heartiest cravings for floral tea goodness.

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.

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.

At Last, Blush

This marks my final review of a NessAlla Kombucha kombucha that comes in a bottle.

I don't know how they determine which flavors are bottled and which ones go into cans. Perhaps ones that have ingredients that degrade more quickly when exposed to light are canned...? Looking at the list of canned kombuchas, most of them incorporate the name of a cocktail or some other blended drink that isn't normally associated with tea, e.g. - "mimosa" and "sangria". Maybe these canned kombuchas are aimed at folks with a more refined palate. Or some such thing.

Onto Peach Blush!

It was a hazy yellow with a slight orange tint that had more than a passing resemblance to my archnemesis in the libation space, the American Hazy IPA. The aroma had a strong vinegar tang to it along with the expected peach and a little somthing floral which, after looking at the ingredients list, I figured was the hibiscus. I surmised that it was these flowers that gave the liquid its orange tint.

Ooh! This stuff was heavier on the fizz than the last few kombuchas I've sampled. It had a nice tang too. A tea-peach combo was at the fore with a hint of hibiscus and just a touch of citrus which proved to be tangerine. A peachy sweetness lasted on the swallow.

I really loved the combination of the tanginess and the fizz. It kept the sweetness in check. There didn't seem to be much in the way of tannins so the sugary taste could have easily gotten out of control.

One thing I've encountered making my way through NessAlla's offerings is that I get a gently cloying sweet tea taste even though there's really not a lot of sugar in these kombuchas. I suspect it's just a bit of gustatory conditioning from having visited in-laws in Alabama and being surrounded by sweet tea and it is weird. Some of these kombuchas taste rather sweet but don't have that thick, syrupy mouthfeel. I don't know if my tongue is especially sensitive to sweetness or who. What would my tongue register if there had been more tannins? Only The Shadow knows.

In the end, this was tasty stuff, although I believe there was natural peach flavoring added. Not sure why that would be necessary or what that is exactly. Still, I eagerly lapped this stuff up.

You got ginger in my lemongrass! You got lemongrass in my ginger!

Next in my drink-thru of the NessAlla menu is a kombucha that has a Southeast Asian tinge to it: Lemongrass Ginger. As someone with a severe addiction to tom yum soup, I wondered how it was that I didn't taste this one first.

The tea was a hazy yellow and the first thing I smelled was that acetic acid tang. There was also sweetness and a lovely citrus-floral mix of lemongrass and ginger.

I think this stuff had a heavier mouthfeel than its appearance betrayed and this mismatch did something to the kombucha tasting part of my brain which made the sweetness came across as being stronger than it likely was in reality. It just had a sweet tea thing going on for me with some tang and that wonderful lemongrass-ginger duo tasting good. These flavors just complement one another so well. They both have citrus and floral elements but the lemongrass leans floral while ginger adds a pepper-like spiciness.

I expected it to be drier on the finish but my tongue never got that wave of tannins and, instead, got a low dose.

This stuff is tasty, though I'd prefer a bit less sugar. By no means as cloying as the drink of the South, it leans in that direction, though only just. The lemongrass and ginger were delicious but overshadowed, at times, by the sweetness.

They say that elderberry is the healer: Elderberry Healer by NessAlla Kombucha

I continue to work my way through NessAlla Kombucha's brews. It's a Madison company where brewers ply their trade just across Starkweather Creek from me so I get to support a local business as I indulge my fancy for kombucha.

With a name like Elderberry Healer, I was expecting my sampling to provide some pukka health benefits.

While I haven’t been ill since I drank this stuff, I am not convinced that I can attribute this wholly or even in-part to it.

Elderberry has a reputation for being a good treatment for colds and probably other ailments. According to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, it’s possible that elderberry will make you feel better if you have a cold or the flu, but the jury is still out.

So, with the salutary effects being questionable, I am left to consider the gustatory ones.

In addition to elderberry, this kombucha features hibiscus, ginger, licorice root, and oil of grapefruit. Regardless of whether it’ll help with a cold, it sounded very tasty.

The brew was a lovely red color – hibiscus is good that way – tinged with brown and a bit hazy. On first sniff my nose caught mildly sweetened tea with a great floral element. It also smelt of elderberries with just a hint of anise.

My tongue was quite pleased to be greeted by a healthy fizziness and tasted of elderberry, hibiscus, a hint of ginger zing, and, thankfully, slightly sweetened tea. I say “thankfully” because I’ve had kombuchas that could compete with the sweetest teas of the South for sheer cavity-inducing terror. The ginger became more prominent on the finish and the anise flavor reared its head here too.

This is an excellent brew! I appreciated the restrained sweetness and adored the elderberry-hibiscus combo. I am not a big licorice root person and, luckily, it was not a major player here but did add some nice contrast as did the zip from the ginger.

(Neil Young voice) Juniper rose, you better go and get it

I don't know why I could just not get a decent photograph of this stuff.

After several weeks and a couple strolls by the Nessalla kombucha factory, I finally busted out my bottle of their Juniper Rose kombucha. I like juniper and rose and it seems to have less sugar than most of their kombuchas. It's about the herbs and spices and not fruits so I assume it's not a big seller.

This stuff is very hazy and a light gold. The aroma was sweet-tart. At first, it tasted a bit like apple cider but I think this was mainly because it had a faux sweetness to it from what I presume was the white tea with rose or whatever it was. Then I got some bitterness from tannins and that kombucha bite which made me realize that this was, in fact, tea. A floral taste was fairly prominent while the piney juniper taste was quite mild.

It had a full body which I think was from that illusory sweetness that the floral taste induced, if that makes sense. My tongue was fooled into thinking there was sweetness present even though there isn't much.

In end, this is a great kombucha. Its floral-spice combo is simply delicious.

Don't mess with my Ness(alla)

Another Madison brand. It's hard to believe that Nessalla has been around for something like 15 years, mainly because I thought they had gone out of business as I recall their fermentorium in the Garver Feed Mill closing during the pandemic.

Well, I have discovered that they filed for bankruptcy and found new owners. This explains the "Manufactured by Upside Func. Beverage Co." on the label. It seems that the Garver location has reopened and things are much like they were pre-pandemic. Can't keep a good kombucha maker down, I always say.

I was a bit ambivalent about buying this bottle. It wasn't the mix of black and green teas nor the organic raspberries. Hibiscus flowers? Yes, please. It was the "organic raspberry flavor". After my experience with that strawberry flavoring essence stuff, I was feeling a bit gun shy. It's organic so it fits in with their ad copy that says they use "only organic and fair trade ingredients". But that banner photo on their webpage shows fresh fruit and loose leaves - no gallon jugs of flavoring from the food chemist. Seems a bit misleading, if you ask me.

Just a peep of fizz upon opening. The liquid was a cloudy, dull gold. It smelled very nice with raspberry up front along with a sour smell like yogurt, and a hint of something floral. As expected, I couldn't taste much fizz. There was, however, a fair amount of sweetness that made it taste smooth. The raspberry was there but not very strong. I like the fruity tartness a lot.

A fruity sweetness lingered on the finish but I could actually taste tea! Weird. The kombuchas I'd sampled up to this point have done a fine job of making you forget you're drinking tea.

Except for some excess sweetness, I really like this brew. The fruit and flower weren't overwhelming and the tartness was great. Tasting tea was a new and exciting thing for me. And no Jolly Rancher flavor!

A Jolly Kombucha

On a recent trek up north, I stopped in at a grocery store in Eau Claire and looked over the kombucha cooler. Would I find any elixir made by folks up north, perhaps featuring spruce tips or thimbleberries or oyster mushrooms or any fruits of the forest? Unfortunately, I was unable to find any made there in the Chippewa Valley but I did find some from the Tapuat Brewing Company in Sister Bay, Wisconsin. I had to look it up. Sister Bay is way out in Lake Michigan, near the tip of Green County.

When I opened this bottle up, I heard a mega rush of fizz. When I poured some in my glass, I got a big, lively head that acted like one from soda pop. I was able to smell the strawberry too as I guess those bubbles shook loose some of those esters and some furaneol and sent those aromatic molecules wafting through the air. Or something.

I looked at the label and saw that it contained CBD so I figured I'd be feeling alright after this tasting. Next I noticed "organic strawberry flavor extract" in the ingredient list. Uff da! I guess Amoretti has moved into the kombucha space. The label features the friendly face of what looks like a matryoshka doll that is surrounded by fruit, including strawberries. No vials or gallon jugs of flavor extract. Kind of a bait and switch, if you ask me.

My first sip was quite fizzy and it tasted like strawberry. I'd say it tasted about 75% like a Jolly Rancher with the rest of genuine fruit. There was a hint of something floral and a honeyed smoothness on the finish but I couldn't get strawberry Jolly Rancher out of my head.

The fizz made for a rather strong astringency but it still tasted rather sweet. This is what I suspect Jolly Rancher strawberry soda tastes like.

Taking the Rude Brew Plunge

I've meant to drink more kombucha than I do for a while now. It's tea and I like tea. (I've taken the Nestea plunge many times.) It is fermented and I like fermented foods. (Beer! Sauerkraut!) But I drink the stuff very sporadically. (Boo!)

Kombucha is prepared by adding a SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast - that slimy thing floating inside your bottle) to sweetened tea - usually black tea, from my experience. You let it sit for a couple of weeks and voila! You've got kombucha. At some point in the process of making the commercial stuff, fruit (juice?), spices, and/or flowers are added. Probably sugar surplus to fermentation requirements too. Some of the stuff on store shelves has a fair amount of sugar in it. Kombucha contains at least some alcohol in it. I think I see "<0.5%" on bottles. I'm not sure if the fermentation process simply produces very little of it or it is removed. It must be the former. Removing alcohol is a complex and expensive process.

Kombucha has some fizziness and so there's a little bit of a bite to the drink along with a bit of tartness.

It doesn't seem that long ago that it was available only at the Willy Street Coop or a similar store. Then a brand or 2 from the west coast appeared in the coolers of more mainstream grocers. Soon enough Madisonians got in on things and we had local kombucha. At some point the drink became big business and now my supermarket's cooler has a whole lot of kombucha in it with maybe 1 local brand, if any. It's a big business these days and I can't help but think that behind the tie dye labels lurk a Kraft or other mega food corporation product. So I buy local, when possible.

A more recent purchase was Wisco Buds & Petals from Madison's Rude Brew.

 

 

Rude Brew dates back to 2017 when proprietor Lacy Rude threw caution to the wind and decided to become a purveyor of kombucha. The bottle gives an address on Sherman Avenue so it seems that she makes her tea at that northside shared commercial kitchen that I cannot remember the name of.

This brew has black & green teas along with elderflower, roses, hops, lavender, lemongrass, and Wisconsin hemp. Sounds delightful!

It looks like a gold color that's had a fair amount of red added to it - something like a white zinfandel. Opening the bottle released a fair amount of fizz. It smelled sweet and floral.

Since the weather gods had mistaken Madison for Phoenix, the temperature outside was 100 degrees and I was happy to find that the kombucha was light and fizzy with a not insignificant amount of tang to it. It tasted floral and herbal and the lemongrass with its floral-citrus thing was fairly prominent. Plus just a hint of sweetness.

I really loved this stuff, especially the floral taste. It wasn't too strong but there was no mistaking the presence of flowers. Just as the label promised, it was a herbal union and a delicious one.

What's not here is just as important as what is here: Prickly Pear Hard Kombucha by Flying Embers

We had several cans of Flying Embers hard kombucha lying around from a shindig my Frau threw last year and I figured there's no use in having them take up space in the refrigerator when that space could be occupied by beer. So I sifted and winnowed looking to try a hard kombucha for the first time.

The coconut stuff had to go. I am just not a big coconut person. I think my older brother tortured me with that coconut-scented tan oil one time after he'd made a couch cushion sandwich out of me and I've just had a mental block on the innocent fruit. The passion fruit, mango, guava stuff went too because they just sounded like they were mimicking an NE IPA.

That left me with the prickly pear variety.

Now, kombucha I'd had before - just not the hard variety. Kombucha is fermented black tea and I know you're shocked to learn that it probably originated in China. It's good stuff. A bit fizzy, a bit tangy, and with whatever other flavors the kombucha maker decided to throw in there.

Looking at all of the cans, I got the impression that Flying Embers was trying to cash in on the "healthier" alcoholic drink market and capture some hard seltzer territory by adding booze to a drink associated with the wisdom of ancient China and supposedly imbued with various and sundry health benefits. I suppose I should qualify "healthier" here and note that this drink has no carbohydrates and some vitamin C but nothing much else.

The pricky pear is the fruit of a particular genus of cacti. I would swear I've had it before somewhere but cannot recall if it was a cocktail or a meal or perhaps a Mexican candy. I don't recall liking it but I also don't recall disliking it.

In the interest of fairness, I will admit that I didn't notice the small print here until I was opening the can to sample: in addition to prickly pear, there's also blue agave. Agave is an ingredient in tequila and I am not a fan of tequila.

And so this drink had a couple strikes against it from the beginning. It seemed to basically be gimmickry and to contain flavors that are distinctly unappealing to me. Still, I endeavor to be fair.

This kombucha was a lovely light orangish brown. My pour produced quite a bit of effervescence as I got a big, white head and I could hear the bubbles popping just like soda. And it went away very quickly just like soda as well. There were a lot of bubbles inside. In addition to prickly pear and blue agave, there is also lime here and the aroma had a large 7-UP component to it. There was some tequila smell as well as what I figured was the prickly pear, a moderately sweet pear-melon kind of scent.

As expected, I tasted all that fizz from the get-go and it was light-bodied. Much to my dismay, the blue agave was right up front with lime and a hint of the kombucha tucked way back. The agave lingered after I swallowed and I tasted some bitterness which I think was the monk fruit, a type of natural sweetener. I have had it before and find it superior to artificial sweeteners like aspartame, though still not as tasty as sugar.

The ingredients list is almost without fruit, per se. There's prickly pair flavor, blue agave essence, and black lime flavor. Oh, and purple plum and something called an "Adaptogen Root Blend" that consisted of ginger, turmeric, and ginseng. These spices may have combined with the fizz and tea to give this drink its bracing kick.

I did not care for this stuff because of the blue agave, mainly. Just not to my taste. But I can certainly see tequila fans enjoying it. Another thing that turned me off was that I could discern little to no kombucha. It's like this gimmick whose only job is to purvey booze and fruity sweetness rather than help out much in the flavoring department.

Junk food pairing: for an authentic food pairing, find a bag of Sabritas Adobadas potato chips. They will complement the zing of the kombucha but add nicely contrasting spicy flavors such as cumin.