D.C. business brews culture of kombucha fans

WASHINGTON — In a back room of D.C.’s Union Kitchen, Andreas Schneider and his co-workers fill 12-ounce glass bottles with a citrus-colored beverage.

A few weeks ago, the drink in the bottle was merely sweetened tea in a large plastic barrel. That was before it spent time under a floating, gooey, rubbery patty in the shape of a thick pancake.

That patty is called a SCOBY, or symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast. The bacteria in the colony are living, similar to bacteria found in yogurts, and the yeast is similar to what brewers and distillers use to ferment their beers or their ingredients.

Over the course of several days, the SCOBY transforms the tea into a low-sugar, carbonated, probiotic-packed beverage, known as kombucha.

Capitalizing on Kombucha in the Nation’s Capital

Schneider began experimenting with kombucha in 2011 when he started business school at George Washington University. He’d been interested in making kombucha for years, he says, but he never found the spare time.

“To really do it properly, you need to be around all the time and really monitor it, otherwise it gets sour fast and turns weird. Kombucha likes attention,” he says.

Schneider brought his home-brewed batches to class, and in no time, classmates Daniel Lieberman and John Lee took an interest in the drink.

“They came to school to start their own business and so we started putting our heads together, seeing if this might be a good idea — and it was.”

It was a good idea for more reasons than the refreshing taste of Schneider’s kombucha. For starters, no other company was making it in the D.C. area. And even though people have been drinking kombucha for thousands of years, consumer awareness of the beverage was low in the nation’s capital, Schneider says.

“We’re trying to make kombucha approachable. It’s been around for a while; it has kind of a funky reputation because it’s fermented,” Schneider says. “You see people being less interested in soda