When Morgan Dowler And Levon Campbell first started brewing kombucha, they didn’t necessarily think you’d be drinking it. Dowler—who studied natural nutrition—and Campbell—the one time manager of Heartwood Bakery & Cafe— kicked off the tasty project for fun just a couple of months ago, using local, organic produce to make a tasty array of flavours (like cranberry, sour grape and lemon ginger depending on what they can get their mitts on) of the fermented tea drink. Then Coburg Coffee (6085 Coburg Road, 429-2326), Dowler’s workplace, got onboard, offering to sell the sweet stuff that eventually became Tea Lake Kombucha and now, just over a month later, the pair is selling upwards of three cases of the sweet stuff a week. Some people say kombucha is a super-juice, we say it’s super-cool that there’s now a locally-made, organically-minded version of it.
This article appears in Jan 31 – Feb 6, 2013.