A gut feeling about hard kombucha being healthy
Year-in-beer forecasts for craft beer industry trends have pointed to, among other things, hard seltzers booming into a core sector of the beer industry. It’s already happening, as we see hard seltzers in taprooms and on retail beer shelves everywhere. Many industry voices champion the hard seltzer as a lifeline for breweries struggling to make ends meet in a strained economy.
As this boom takes place, I am surprised most people would drink hard seltzer before drinking hard kombucha. Both beverages seem to appeal to health-conscious consumers, and both are widely available as gluten-free beer alternatives.
Health-conscious drinkers like hard seltzer because it has fewer calories than beer, while they drink hard kombucha because it is supposedly rich in living microbes that improve gut health (even if most folks can’t explain what that really means).
I’ve had a few hard seltzers, and they seem fairly one-dimensional.
(Will we see barrel-aged seltzers as a craft beer trend of this year or next? I would count on it.)
By comparison, hard kombucha seems — and I agree this is a baseless gut-feeling
notion — to have more going on. It tends to be hazier than seltzer, and you may even find sediment, soot and other gunk drifting around at the bottom of the bottle.
I recently sampled a few
new offerings from Boochcraft, a major hard kombucha producer in Chula Vista, near San Diego. The cans and bottles of this brand advise consumers to keep the drinks refrigerated
because they are “live cultured.” I’ll buy that.
The company’s Liquid Art Lab series amounts to what it calls its “innovation playground.”
The black apple hibiscus drinks rather like a spiced cider. It contains Arkansas black apples, ginger, lemon juice, hibiscus and cinnamon.
The pineapple vanilla chai brings an unpredictable tropical fruit blend to the can. The flavor calls to mind a tropical cocktail. It also challenges the way that brewers typically use vanilla — that is, as a flavor complement to dark, rich beers made with coffee and aged in booze barrels. In this case, vanilla flavor proves to be a viable companion additive to juicy tropical fruits.
The Liquid Art Lab also includes blueberry juniper, passionfruit blood orange and strawberry rhubarb.
Boochcraft is also working a lineup of hard kombuchas oriented around single-farm products showcased as examples of sustainable organic family farming.
In this series we find the heirloom peach, heirloom kiwi and more. The heirloom tangerine is a fruity, juicy, gluten-free alternative to an IPA.
So, what makes hard kombuchas better than hard seltzers, like the grapefruit-hibiscus flavor from Pond Farm? Health claims abound about kombucha, soft and hard alike.
Producers imply that the probiotic qualities of kombucha improve intestinal health, and promoters have made direct claims that kombucha can strengthen the immune system, stanch the growth of cancer, boost liver function and streamline the body’s digestive processes. But these are claims that a layperson could never prove or debunk. Even research has not substantiated them.
So, why do I prefer hard kombucha overc as a healthier alternative to beer? I guess you could say it’s nothing more than a gut feeling.