Western Morning News (Saturday)
Need a pick-me-up? Try a health-giving drink to enhance wellbeing
Martin Hesp meets a young woman making kombucha, a drink based on an ancient fermentation process practised in parts of China for centuries...
Ayoung woman surveys dozens of steel vats, filled with the bubbling bacterial goodness she has developed a passion for. Inside each vat floats a strange entity called a scoby, which is mother to all those beneficial bacteria happily fermenting in the carefully controlled heat – all trapped inside a room which has been specially designed inside another room to house this Westcountry production facility.
The woman flicks a switch to play some classical music, which she says keeps the mothers and the bacteria happy – and the sound of violins fills the special room and also the vast old lecture hall in which it sits. It is like a movie set. Indeed, the young woman could be a movie star, because this extraordinary story has its roots at the New York Film Academy. You mutter something about her looking like some exotic alchemist in a kind of James Bond movie, and she laughs and says: “More like Breaking Bad, perhaps…”
Except the stuff they so infamously make in the TV series Breaking Bad is ruinous to human health – whereas the product which Eaoifa Forward is fermenting is very good for you indeed. It is called kombucha, and I’m willing to put my hand on heart to support the claim because I’ve been imbibing a glass of it daily since I went to Devon to visit Eaoifa and her Boo Chi drinks company. I swear it has noticeably improved my feeling of wellbeing.
And if any reader sees the word kombucha and recoils from memories of the undrinkable old hippy stuff they used to sell in overly-worthy health food shops, think again. The six flavours of Boo Chi kombucha are delicious. And here’s another fact that might cause you to drop preconceived images of the “it ain’t good for you unless it’s plain or horrible” fringe… So mainstream is kombucha in the USA nowadays, this fermented drink made from sweet tea has given rise to a two billion-dollar a year industry!
But why should an ex-lecture-theatre be playing host to a drinks company? The answer is simple: Eaoifa was running Boo Chi from a specialist food unit in London when Covid came along and she fell pregnant – as South Devon was home to both her parents and her partner, Marcus, she moved down to the county and found a suitable premises for her booming business at the site which was once the Seale Hayne agricultural college.
She then had to build a special temperature controlled room inside the big lecture theatre, but Eaoifa is not the kind of person who lets small details like that shake her from her goals.
More about this remarkable young woman in a moment – first let’s establish exactly what kombucha is… For a start, it is an ancient fermentation process, practised in certain parts of China for centuries. The word SCOBY comes from the term “symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast” – in the case of kombucha, this develops as a result of the fermenting of highly sugared tea. The scoby sometimes known as a “tea fungus” or “mushroom”, is actually a symbiotic growth of acetic acid bacteria and yeast species. These living bacteria are said to be massively probiotic, hence the booming popularity of the drink.
So how did an attractive wanna-be actress from Devon not only discover the delights of kombucha, but then devote her entire career to making and selling it? It’s a good story and one that starts at the New York Film Academy – or rather, it begins with Eaoifa having graduated from that star-studded seat of learning...
“I had returned to London and I was looking for acting jobs – and I think I reached a period of exhaustion,” smiles Eaoifa when we meet at her Seale Hayne base. “I was diagnosed with anxiety and went to a therapist who sorted me out – but he also recommended I take a break. A good friend was going to Sri Lanka and she said: ‘Come with me!’ It was so spontaneous.
“We ended up on the east coast in a shack on the beach where we signed up to a yoga class – and it was there we met a teacher who gave us a glass of kombucha. We tried it – and I didn’t like it – but it’s all about how it’s going to make you feel. We had another glass the next day, and so on... And I was suddenly like... There is something about this drink! Ten days in, we asked the woman if she could show us how to make kombucha. She took us into this crazy kitchen full of jam-jars and things pickling, and showed us how to do it.”
“This was an original kind of kombucha,” recalls Eaofa. “A proper home-brew with huge amounts of yeast and sediment. A very heady mix and extremely acidic. But it was that acidity...
There was something about it. It quenches your thirst. The stuff in Sri Lanka was actually pretty horrid. When she showed us how she made it, I wasn’t quite sure what I’d just seen.
“But something in me had shifted. I’d had a complete rest and reset and there was something in my body that felt different. There was an energy. There was something about this drink that made me feel a tiny bit high – high on life – just better in my head.”
Cutting the story short, Eaoifa returned to London and started shopping for commercial brands of kombucha before she decided to make it for herself. A job which she was well qualified to do having originally studied chemistry at university.
“In 2016 I started drinking different kombuchas – some were sweet, some fizzy, and I thought: ‘This is not what I had in Sri Lanka’. So I started researching it all and purchased my first organic scoby. By 2017 I was making it myself. It just so happened that it came out really well – which doesn’t always happen. There is some luck to it – but it’s also about knowing what you are doing.”
“I had no intention of starting a business. I thought I’ll just drink this myself,” remembers Eaoifa. “I found it fascinating. As humans, we are more bacteria than anything else. So putting good bacteria into the gut helps balance you. It can lift your mood – after all, 90% of serotonin, the happy hormone, is made in your gut. So if your gut is in good shape, you can have good mental health.
“Very quickly I was giving my kombucha to friends. Then I started experimenting. Could I start doing some flavours? From the get-go I was organic, but I wanted some unusual flavours, so I developed our original – the turmeric and black pepper. Then I started doing farmers’ markets around London, and I got some awful feedback and some brilliant feedback.”
One example of the latter came from a well known rap-artist who started extolling the virtues of Boo Chi on Instagram. “Overnight, my Instagram account went from 100 followers to 3,500,” recalls Eaoifa.
“I ended up converting my spare room into a microbrewery and I
invested in 20 litre steel tanks. It was a huge learning curve. To make kombucha you need a very clean space, and you only use glass or food-grade stainless steel.
“Then it’s about ingredients. You are making a sweet tea – boiling water and literally making a very sweet tea – allowing it to cool, pouring in your culture, placing on a cloth top... You leave it to ferment in a warm space for anywhere between a week and two weeks.
“I’d carry my glass jar from my kitchen up two floors to my microbrewery – then weeks later I would hand-tap off into jam jars and put the labels on for market. A bit like Breaking Bad, I guess.”
Eaoifa laughs, but she soon learned that starting a business
was no laughing matter. For example, as Boo Chi expanded she had to move to a larger premises, which turned out to have black mould in the walls, which ruined the kombucha cultures she’d built up. And so on... Few start-up businesses run smoothly from day one, and Boo Chi was no exception. But armed with drive and passion, Eaoifa overcame all the hurdles – including the biggest one of all presented by Covid.
What do you do when your outlets and markets are closed? Answer: produce a home-brew kit so people can start making kombucha at home. The kits are now an important part of the Boo Chi business – which you can learn more about by visiting https:// www.boochi.co.uk