01-05-2025
Restaurant Road Trip: Neighborhood Kombuchery
MORGANTOWN, (WBOY) — Spring is here and as it continues to warm up, you may be thirsty for a refreshing drink. If so, one Morgantown business can keep you guessing with its quenching and creative kombucha flavors.
If you've ever wondered what blue milk tastes like in Star Wars, the Neighborhood Kombuchery in Morgantown has taken a crack at it for you to try.
If you're not familiar with kombucha, it's 'a fermented tea in its short form. And, we take a sweet tea, and we add a culture to it, a SCOBY—a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast—and we let that ferment until we deem it tastes good,' according to brewer Cody Woodring.
Founded in 2019 by Carissa Herman and her husband Andrew Rhodes, the Neighborhood Kombuchery has quickly expanded to local businesses and now distributes all over the state and even into Pennsylvania and Maryland.
At the Kombuchery, you can opt to get flavors on tap or canned, and for special flavors like blue milk, it is only available on tap during the week of May 4, known by Star Wars fans as 'May the Fourth be with You.'
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Inspired by a former brewery's own blue milk beer, the Kombuchery got to work on figuring out how to make the unique flavor.
'So, we don't have 'Banthas,' but we have bananas, and bananas when they are not quite as ripe…have more carbohydrates in them and starches, which are opaque, so we are basically juicing bananas and throwing them in there,' Woodring said.
For the blue pop of color, they use blue spirulina, a natural dye. And just like with its blue milk flavor, the Kombuchery uses natural dyes and ingredients to flavor its drinks.
'Usually when we're flavoring, if we're infusing like a dry herb we let it sit for a day or two to kind of mix into the things. This one is a nice one to let sit for a bit so the pulp from the banana settles out before we package it up and carbonate it,' Woodring said.
12 News's Barbara Ron tasted the unique flavor, and said that 'you can taste the bananas, but it's not, like, annoying and sweet like in a banana bread or something. It's light.'
The Neighborhood Kombuchery is located at 119 Pleasant St. in Morgantown and is open from 3-7 p.m. on Fridays. On Saturdays, you can find them at the Morgantown Farmers Market. For more information, you can visit here.
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