Rochester kombucha brewery fuses cocktail culture and health-conscious drink
Brenna Multala started Kombucharista in 2021 and hopes to continue to grow the company in the coming years
What started in her parents’ closet has graduated to a closet-adjacent enclosure in a downtown Rochester food business incubator, but Brenna Multala is stricken with the entrepreneur bug and has grand plans for the future of her kombucha brewery.
Don’t count her out.
Through Kombucharista, the business she launched in 2021, Multala, 26, provides something a bit different than the area’s other kombucha producers — cocktail-inspired non-alcoholic tea-based drinks. Her delicious concoctions, produced on a nano scale at The Commissary inside Sibley Square, deliver a delicious alternative to other boozy offerings.
“I just love messing around with flavors,” she said. “It gets the creative juices flowing. I am not great with painting, sketching, pottery, but this, I can create with. This is cool. I have some friends I geek out with about fermentation.”
It’s quite the glow up from those first homebrewed batches. And with the vigor and energy of someone with her work ethic, insight, and outlook, it would be foolish to count her out.
“It started as a hobby. I just wanted to dip my toes in it,” she said. “I was a college student. I was at RIT for economics, which I absolutely loved. But I wanted a hobby that was cheap. It’s tea, filtered water, and sugar. I also wanted to do it, because I had been drinking kombucha for probably close to a decade at that point. I wanted to start drinking flavors that I couldn’t buy. Things like lemonade, fun pineapple-coconut flavors, stuff like that.”
Multala remembers the first time she tried it — she was 12 or 13 and snuck a bottle into her mom’s shopping cart at Wegmans.
“It just popped out to me on the shelf. I was like, ‘That looks really weird.’ And I was reading the ingredients. ‘I don’t know what this is, but mom, can I please get this?’” she said.
“I was just hooked. I thought it was the most interesting drink I’d had. I just kept striving to create something like that and I kept trying every single flavor I could find.”
And this is precisely why I love the local kombucha scene. It kinda mirrors the local beer scene, because there is something for everyone and every producer is doing things just a bit differently. Just in the city of Rochester, you have Katboocha at the Rochester Public Market with its array of creative combinations and then you have Happy Gut Sanctuary at High Falls with its focus on more traditional expressions and explorations of teas. Kombucharista dovetails beautifully into this scene.
So what is kombucha and why does Multala love it?
Kombucha is over 2,000 years old and originated in China. (Thanks Wikipedia.) Over the centuries, its consumption has spread across the globe. And since its alcohol content measures less than 0.5 percent, it is not federally regulated. (Though producers in the Rochester area will tell you about the bureaucratic red tape that must still be navigated to gain state approval through the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets.)
It is a fermented beverage that begins as a black or green sweetened tea, Multala said. Utilizing a SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast), the fermented drink gains some natural carbonation. The SCOBY, this alien-like disk that forms at the top of the liquid (zoogleal mat known as a mother), provides the engine for fermentation.
The finished drink is rich in probiotics, encouraging gut health, vitamins, and micronutrients, Multala said. She’s big on using fresh citrus and herbs in her creations, too.
Multala loves it because it provides a blank canvas on which to express herself. With kombucha as the base, she can design a tasty beverage that’ll appeal to a lot of different people.
Fermenting a future
Multala, a Bloomfield native, graduated from Mercy High School and the Rochester Institute of Technology. She spent the last eight years working in the service industry in a number of different roles. Her time in bars and restaurants allowed her to observe what people liked and also what was missing from the market.
“That’s what really helped me fund the business,” Multala said. “However, late nights and getting home at 1 or 2 a.m. on a Tuesday, you can’t exactly do any more. So about two months ago, I got a full-time gig, office job. It’s my first time ever in an office, a big time corporate job. It’s a big transition — working at night to having a hard start and a hard stop. I’m adjusting.”
She still picks up bartending shifts here and there. But adds, “I couldn’t be doing it. So now I have my 8-to-5 job and this (kombucha) is my 5-to-10. So I really work full time for myself as well.”
That’s why Kombucharista, a combination of kombucha and barista (Multala said you can be your own barista, if you want), fills an untapped niche and combines two of her passions. She’s a long-time kombucha homebrewer and saw no one was producing cocktail-inspired flavors. And as an added bonus, her kombucha can be enjoyed on its own (and is a featured non-alcoholic option at some local bars and restaurants) and as a mixer with something like vodka or gin.
“I was already brewing stuff for myself that I couldn’t buy, so I asked myself, ‘What else do I not see?’” Multala said.
The answer was cocktail flavors.
Her flavors, as of right now:
Marg — black tea base with strawberries, lime, and fresh basil;
Mimosa — black tea base with fresh orange juice;
Mule (our personal favorite) — black tea base with ginger, lime juice, and fresh mint;
Paloma black tea base with rosemary, grapefruit, and lime;
Kombucharista turned 3 in July, but Multala didn’t start producing until about 14 months ago. As the sole person (and owner) in the business, it took quite a bit of time to gain the proper approvals and certifications necessary to produce.
She made the decision to turn the hobby into a business when she started applying for jobs after undergrad and couldn’t find the right fit.
“I just decided to make my own job,” Multala. “Thankfully, it has been revenue-generating, which is awesome. But I’ve got to take it to the next step now. And I said, ‘I’ve never seen these flavors in the market.’ So I started experimenting and I got my LLC in 10 minutes. I just figured, ‘OK, I’m gonna do this.’ I worked to perfect the recipes and that was it.”
She now produces in 40-gallon batches at The Commissary. The Commissary has a production kitchen and storage available for all the businesses currently incubating there. She brews, filters, and bottles at the East Main Street spot.
But with demand outstripping supply, she has started to explore options for expansion. She said co-packing isn’t in the cards, because she’d have to scale up too much. She’s currently looking for her own space, but said finding the right “industrial space is hard right now. I don’t want anything massive.”
She has no plans to open a retail space. Instead, she wants to focus on manufacturing and production, hoping to mirror what she’s seen at The Commissary and also at Paul Guglielmo’s Craft Cannery in Genesee County. At Guglielmo’s facility, they produce his line of pasta sauces but also offer co-packing services for a number of different small businesses. Multala would like to offer something similar for craft beverage producers.
“I want to help other small beverage brands get co-packed without a minimum,” Multala said. “Because it’s the issue I’m having, co-packers want between 1,000 to 5,000 gallons per SKU. How am I going to make that jump? I think it’s just crazy. Pauly is doing it with sauces and marinades and I love him. We catch up here and there and he says, you’ve just got to go for it. I’d love to be that person who helps other small brands.”
Currently, she’s available at The Commissary, Lori’s Natural Foods in Henrietta, AltBar in the North Winton Village (I heartily recommend picking up the Kombucharista Mule and mixing it with an N/A vodka), various local farmers markets (make sure to check out the brewery’s social media feeds for details here), Birdhouse Brewing in Honeoye, and a few other spots.
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