WHITEFISH — A Whitefish husband and wife team recently created a kombucha company that uses fresh Flathead Valley ingredients.
Sam and Pete Avery started Dark Side Fermenters about 18 months ago, creating an alternative beverage to beer that people could still enjoy at breweries.
"My husband was working in the beer industry and noticed that there was a lack of beverages for those people that didn't want to drink alcohol or gluten at all these awesome breweries around town," Sam said. "So we thought making Kombucha would be a great way to fill that void."
The Averys use fruit from Avery's family farm in Polson.
"We were seeing all this beautiful fruit go to waste and we were already trying to come up with a good idea of how to use this awesome fruit that is grown here for alternative purposes," said Avery.
Sam said that kombucha is a fermented tea drink mixed with fruit juice, spices and sugar. She explained that from start to finish, the whole process to send their kombucha to market takes two weeks.
The live cultures needed for the fermentation process are crucial for kombucha to form a large mass formally known as a SCOBY -- which stands for symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast -- creating the fermentation and signature kombucha taste.
With backgrounds in microbiology and the beer industry, Sam's husband Pete says they created Dark Side Fermenters to stand out from their competition - and how Dark Side Fermenters got its name.
"A play on the fact that we don't want to be a natural or health food beverage, we want to be the dark side of kombucha," explained Pete.
He said that kombucha has low sugar and probiotics, and Dark Side Fermenters is meant to go alongside the brewery scene. "We're on tap at distilleries, we like to add gin to it. We like to be a part of the beverage scene, kind of like the public house scene."
Dark Side Fermenters is heading to Guatemala next month to help others get started in the business.
"Helping a group of women, helping them to start their own kombucha company, that they will then run. It won't be run by us, here in the United States, but by them after we leave so they can sell kombucha to tourists and use it as a way to draw people in," said Avery.
