OUR farmer and BREWER

Don DeVault has worked his family farm off and on for the past 22 years. The focus of production began with a gourmet mesclun marketed and sold to high-end restaurants and city markets. Four-season salad mixes were a perfect complement to his parents’ diverse main-season CSA production on the farm. The market for organic produce changed dramatically over a 5 year period while Don was homesteading in Chile, South America, where his daughter, Lucía, was born. Out of necessity on the off-grid homestead, he had grown a variety of herbs for herbal teas, infusions and tisanes aimed at calming the nerves and stomach and soothing irritations, aches, and pains. He brought this herbal practice back to the farm in Emmaus, searching for a way to bring small-scale home-remedy-style production to a wider audience while maintaining a personal approach. Because of its growing popularity, kombucha, with its own host of health benefits, turned out to be the perfect vehicle to bring the seasonal farm flavors of traditional botanical healing to a mainstream market. For a few seasons, most of the work went into perfecting new planting and harvesting techniques that resulted in the best possible inputs for brewing kombucha year-round. Focusing on secondary fermentation to infuse herbs and fruits from the family farm brought about a transition from growing produce to producing a product line of delicious, healthy, low-sugar beverages. In 2020, Portch Tea expanded into production of alcoholic kombucha as a licensed limited winery.