Profile: Sambucha Kombucha, Pangbourne, Berkshire, UK
Sambucha Kombucha is located in Pangbourne, near Reading, England on the banks of the River Thames.
It is a “hobby turned full-time job” for Sam May, who moved from California to the UK. The commercial operation started during lockdown and “kind of just snowballed into something a lot bigger as the years went on.”
Its production facility is an insulated shipping container:
It’s an old Waitrose freezer container that I converted myself. It’s on some certified organic land on a farm. So any fruit and veg that grows there, I tend to use as much as possible in the kombucha. And that’s really, really cool. But the container itself is great for keeping the heat in in the wintertime for fermentation.
Sustainability and growth
Sambucha actively encourages customers to return bottles, with approximately 300 a month being sanitized and refilled, so in each brew, half of the bottles are returned, demonstrating a strong cyclical system and loyal customer base. The bottles feature a decorative tag over the top rather than full gum labels to facilitate easier return and cleaning.
Their distribution channels include online orders (a la carte and subscription with local delivery), farmers markets, and local stockists, all listed on their website. She mentions having some of the same customers for almost five years.
Sam observes that when she first started brewing, there was very little kombucha in the UK:
So I took things into my own hands and started educating people and telling them that it can taste like soda naturally, that’s when people’s interest started to peak. It took a lot of education over the first year and a half, two years. [Now] gut health is becoming quite popular.
There’s now healthy growth:
I get so many new customers each month. Just this month alone, I’ve had four new subscribers. And then I go to anywhere from six to eight markets a month. And half of those people are return customers and half are always new faces and they’re always coming back for more. So it feels really good. And I’ve noticed it’s really picked up a lot because I think word of mouth is spreading.
Production and flavors
Sam brews once a month with the help of part-time staff. Fermentation times vary depending on the kombucha type. Fruity kombuchas have an 11-day ferment, while the vintage (unflavored) kombucha ferments for a minimum of one month and can go up to two months.
Sambucha only uses ripe fruits. The flavors adapt to the seasons, with winter featuring ingredients like ginger, satsuma, and foraged apples. The vintage unflavored kombucha is also more prominent in winter. Each bottle is packed with at minimum, a cup of fruit or root veg. It sells at £5.50 per 500ml bottle.
Flavors include:
- Strawberry
- Satsuma
- Pineapple & Passionfruit
- Pineapple, Chili, & Blue Spirulina
- Ginger
- Ginger & Lemongrass
- Original
- Pineapple
- Vanilla Apple Spice
Small business success
Sambucha is now Sam’s full-time source of income, and she is happy with the current size of the business.
I really am happy with how big Sambucha is because I still do everything by hand. I’m still really involved. I enjoy making. I enjoy seeing the benefits. I enjoy tasting my kombucha and being like, damn, that’s the best kombucha in the UK. And everyone else telling me so as well. So it’s a good feeling. I don’t want to expand because it could possibly affect the quality of the kombucha. I’m just I’m happy with the way things are. And there’s always plenty of kombucha for me and my customers.
She strategically focuses on a local radius of 35 to 40 miles from Pangborn, consciously avoiding larger markets in central London. “There’s plenty of kombucha in London. You know, let them have their territory and I’ll have mine.”
Interview
Click on the podcast to hear Sam tell the story of Sambucha Kombucha.
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