refreshing
How it'sMade?
1. Keep it Real
Being real is what we do. We do not put anything in our Kombucha that you cannot find essentially in the same form in nature. You just can’t improve on God… Which means we try to get our ingredients in as natural and unadulterated as possible.
2. Keep it local
The best way to achieve #1 above is to buy ingredients as locally as you can. We are also proud Floridians with an unapologetic bias towards this beautiful corner of the world we call home.
We begin with water
We begin with water drawn from aquifers under our feet which provide a mineral rich basis for the organic Green and Black Tea we use to make our feedstock tea. The ample rains of the Sunshine State ensure that our organic sugar, grown on the shores of beautiful lake Okeechobee, are able to feed our cultures (SCOBY’s) for a perfect fermentation.
amazing taste
Our Kombucha gets it’s amazing taste and striking color straight out of bountiful nature. Fresh fruit and raw honey was what we used when we first started this brewing journey in our kitchen and we have not found any reason to deviate from this path.
unpasteurised honey
The pollen that makes our raw, unpasteurised honey is gathered by the worker bees of a local beekeeper from the wild flowers of the Space Coast. It is the same wild flowers that prompted Juan Ponce De Leon, who’s first landfall in 1513 was not far from where our brewery is today, to call it “La Florida”.
fresh fruit only
We get our fruit from local suppliers and buy local and organic whenever it is possible to do so. The only exception to our strict “fresh fruit only” rule, is for the orange juice in our Liquid Sunshine flavor. Oranges do not keep well and the only way to have a supply of orange juice without preservatives is to use frozen concentrated orange juice. HOWEVER, we stay local and real - This process was developed in Florida in 1948 and nothing but orange juice is used to make it.
industrial manufacturing process
Our Kombucha is raw, unfiltered and unpasteurized. It is the result of a delicate balance in the symbiotic dance between the yeasts and the bacteria in our SCOBY’s. Our role as brewers are more akin to farming than it is an industrial manufacturing process.
We cannot manufacture the probiotics and complex organic acids that are at the heart of our Kombucha, we can only provide the optimal environment and the best food that our legions of microscopic co-workers need ... then we wait for them to do their magic!
safe product
You cannot rush a ferment, it is a living thing and there are so many factors that all play a role in the end product that we cannot say for certain when a batch will be ready. We measure and control a range of parameters to ensure a consistent and safe product but the only way to say when a batch is ready to enjoy, is to taste it.
We wait and we taste and we wait and we taste…. From beginning to end it can easily take a month until we achieve the perfect balance between sweet and tart with just a light effervescence to tingle the tongue. Or as we call it: the perfect glass of Big Dog Kombucha!