People always ask us how we make our Booch, so here’s our attempt to share with you the journey each bottle of Hippie undergoes. It all starts with our teas.  Our team has carefully selected quality 100% organic fruits, florals, and teas, and our suppliers must pass the 2 following checks that we perform.

1. THE COMPANY CHECKS OUT

What this means, is we want to make sure that not only the ingredients we use are taken care of, but also the people in that business.  It’s important to us, as they support our booch, and are an extended part of our family, so they must be cared for.

2. IT'S SUSTAINABLY SOURCED

It’s easy to take short cuts, and it’s not a price-driven decision by us.  We pay a premium, because we use premium products, that are sourced in a way that supports the greater ecosystem. We do our best to ensure that this remains key in the culture of our many suppliers.

Now we have our tea blend, our team gets to work with the first step:

TEA TIME

Our hand-made custom teas, are steeped in stainless steel vats for a period of time, so they can impart their beautiful floral qualities on our waters. We add organic raw cane sugar to our hot tea at this stage, and when our early blend is ready, it’s over to to the fermentation stage.

FERMENTATION

We introduce some of our ‘starter’ or Original Brew, an advance-staged nutrient & bacteria rich booch brew that we’ve already prepared for addition, so it can impart some key bacteria to get the process underway. 

HELLO SCOBY

The SCOBY (Symbiotic Colony of Bacteria & Yeast) is a key element to Kombucha.  Each batch of Hippie receives a large SCOBY at the start of it’s life cycle, and during the production time (2-4 weeks), it will grow another again. Think of a SCOBY like the Great Barrier Reef - it’s the object that maintains the eco system of it’s local environment. It’s the home where the bacteria & yeast reside.  They are created from the fermentation process where the sugar converts to bacteria & good gut acids. They bring life to every single serve of Hippie.

READY TO SHIP

Unlike many other commercial brewers, we don’t add flavourings or carbonation beyond this stage.  Hippie’s next stage of life is to say goodbye to their Stainless Vat and hello to their new packaging.  We then leave them to get to know each other for a couple of weeks before we ship them out to our friends for consumption.