Weaverville’s “Buchi mamas” scramble to overcome an industry scandal.

by Melanie McGee Bianchi photos by Matt Rose

Jeannine Buscher looks far too wholesome to get anyone drunk. With her alpine-blonde hair, lean physique and handsome hand-knit sweaters, she is health evoked in gentle pastel. And health is exactly what Buscher and her business partner, Sarah Schomber, are successfully selling. Buchi is the cultishly popular brand of kombucha tea that the two mix and bottle at their Weaverville microbrewery, helped by a half-dozen part-time women employees.

Actually, “brew” is misleading. Containing only a .5 percent alcohol content—about the same as “near beer”—the cold, carbonated tea is not drunk for mere fun, though its spicy-sour tang has a certain earthy appeal. Instead, it’s a health tonic that dates back eons, to ancient China. Kombucha is crammed with vitamins and probiotics. It purportedly boosts immunity and cures hangovers and digestive ills, among a slew of other ailments. (Buscher claims her psoriasis is dormant due to consuming kombucha.)

While not a hard drink, it is a “live” fermented beverage containing bacteria and yeast, and must be managed with delicacy and deep know-how. This caused a crisis in June, when an overly alcoholic batch of another brand of kombucha accidentally trickled into national markets. Whole Foods, the giant natural-grocery chain that owns Greenlife in Asheville, reacted by pulling all kombucha products from its shelves—including local Buchi.

Schomber, a woman whose tightly coiled energy corresponds with her glossy mass of red ringlets, calls the scandal a “catastrophe,” but also adds: “We made the best of it. If it had to happen, the timing couldn’t have been better for us, because we had just moved to our new place.” The two women started the business in September 2008, working out of the Blue Ridge Food Ventures experimental kitchens at A-B Tech. They started selling their tea in stores last May. This summer, they expanded into their current, 6,000-square-foot operation. But lucky for them, their products were pulled before they had brewed any big batches at the new facility. Yes, they had to toss some inventory, but not much. In the new space, they installed a $15,000 piece of testing equipment to keep their tea at acceptable fermentation levels.

Such puffs of luck have characterized the whole Buchi journey. Buscher, who has an 8-year-old son, and Schomber, the mother of two young daughters, met in Asheville through a homeschool cooperative. “The teacher did home visits, and we both offered her kombucha tea,” Buscher recalls.

They entered a long phase of experimentation, joining and refining their already remarkably similar homemade kombucha recipes in one another’s kitchens with the goal of starting a business that would let them stay home with their kids.

Buscher, especially, was thrilled to find a fellow brewer so serendipitously. She came to Asheville from Denton, Texas, “where everyone thought the tea was gross, if I could even get them to try it,” she says. “Here, there were so many people who already knew and loved kombucha. I was in heaven.”

Once bottled and branded, the tea took off. Buchi is a hot commodity at the area’s outdoor festivals and sells in dozens of Asheville restaurants and Southeastern natural-food markets. Last month, it won the Best Local Food/Drink Product category in the Mountain Xpress annual readers’ poll, beating out Highland Brewing Company beer. And though their business has enjoyed steady expansion, Schomber and Buscher are adamant about keeping their product local. Limited transport time means the tea is sold as fresh as it’s meant to be—a “living beverage” since the Qin dynasty.

“We will never pasteurize,” declares Schomber, curling her slim fingers tight. Neither will she give out her and Buscher’s fiercely guarded recipe to eager homebrewers and would-be entrepreneurs. “We’ve put our blood, sweat and tears into this business. We’ve sacrificed two years of family time, we’ve compromised our health—we have just about run ourselves into the ground to make this happen... I’m not handing out the golden ticket.”

They happily collaborate with other established kombucha businesses, however. Limited-edition bottles of Buchi have been allowed back at Greenlife, but the national controversy is still brewing. Big companies like GT’s Synergy kombuchas have been off the shelves at stores nationwide for months. Schomber and Buscher are exploring a legal variance that would categorize the drink with certain kinds of apple cider, but they fear the FDA might eventually demand that kombucha be sold as an alcoholic drink—necessitating a complicated, expensive and misleading turnabout in production and marketing. “Right now, kombucha makers are just trying to adapt,” says Schomber. “Advocates have been passionate about coming together to survive this.”