Foragers Hive

Meet the maker

Hi, I'm Don. Foragers Hive is my home fermentation project — veteran-owned, and brewed out of a very busy home brew room in North Carolina.

I started with mead and fell in love with brewing — experimenting, and chasing the best flavors I could make. I wandered into kombucha looking for a healthier drink I could enjoy every day, and fell in love all over again. I'm constantly tweaking recipes, digging into the biology behind the ferment, and testing how different sugars and acids change what ends up in the glass. And it's been a goal of mine for a long time to one day open a commercial kombuchary, where I can share this passion with my community.

Why kombucha

Ask me my favorite part and it's the tinkering: a different flavor, a touch more of this acid, a little less of that sugar — and a completely different drink at the end. And it's the sharing. My favorite moment in this hobby is handing a glass to someone who just told me "I don't like kombucha" — or who's never had it at all — and watching their face light up at a homebrew. That's the moment Foragers Hive exists for.

Homebrewed vs. store-bought — what's actually different

Nothing against the bottles at the grocery store — the good raw ones are what got a lot of us started. But a commercial kombucha has a hard job: every bottle has to taste exactly the same, and by law it has to stay under 0.5% alcohol to sit on that shelf. To pull that off, many brands pasteurize or filter out the living culture, brew from concentrate, or force in the fizz with CO2 instead of letting the ferment make it. The result is consistent — and consistency is kind of the opposite of experimenting.

Homebrewed kombucha is alive, unfiltered, and unpasteurized. It carbonates itself in the bottle. It tastes like the batch, the fruit that was ripe that week, and the idea you wanted to test. No two batches are exactly alike — which is exactly why you have to write everything down. (That's also how a certain tracker app got started.)

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