Stuff We make
KOMBUCHA
Kombucha, at its most essential, is a sweet tea that has been fermented by a particular culture of bacteria and yeast. The result, when well executed, is a lightly effervescent, mildly acidic beverage containing live probiotic culture and trace amounts of alcohol (<.5% by law). By focusing on the quality and type of tea used, and tweaking, among others, the variables of time and temperature, quite a wide range of flavors of “unflavored” kombucha can be produced. While the choice of tea (and yerba maté) for our base kombucha was deliberate, it was also primarily designed to set up secondary fermentation. Experiments with growing tea and maté in high tunnel greenhouses are ongoing, but the true focus is on imbuing this “base” (unflavored) kombucha with the herbs and fruit that grow well here in southeastern Pennsylvania. Portch Tea produces dozens (and dozens) of different flavor combinations from what the farm grows in a given season.
HARD KOMBUCHA
Our hard kombucha uses some different equipment, but is made by simply extending and fortifying the same fermentation process by which our non-alcoholic kombucha is made.
BLAM-O! (4% abv). Blueberry Chamomile. Tight like a light, dry country wine with a round floral apple finish.
SIMÓN LIMÓN (4% abv). Lemongrass, Lemon Balm, Lemon Verbena. Herbaceous lemon on the nose that follows playfully through to the palate without pushing into the grimacing sourness of citric acid.
GINGER BEER
“Those Redheads”, while not a hard kombucha, follows the same approach to fermenting a sweet tea (hibiscus) base with a heavy-handed dose of ginger, lemongrass and rosemary for a lighter, cleaner, dry finish at 5.8% abv. It offers something like a tropical Moscow Mule flavor profile in an eminently crushable fermented beverage.
THOSE REDHEADS (5.8% abv). Ginger, Lemongrass, Rosemary, Hibiscus. As clean as catching a knife-edge barrel breaking left, leaving you with that slow-motion glittering burn through color and sound closing down around you trailing your fingers through the vastness of the universe.