A festival in Ottawa next month will focus on the increasingly popular drink of kombucha.
The second annual Kombucha Festival will feature samples from dozens of companies and what is advertised as the world’s largest homemade kombucha competition. Last year’s festival, called ‘Boochfest’ for short, attracted over 2,000 visitors over the course of a day, showing that there is clearly an audience devoted to this unusual beverage.
Popular in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Northeastern China, kombucha is a fermented version of tea created with a special type of bacteria. Sweet and lightly alcoholic, some drinkers impute health benefits to the drink, but these claims are heavily disputed. It has recently become popular in the West as an alternative to heavier alcoholic drinks. Forbes has estimated that the drink’s annual sales will reach $1.8bn by 2020.
The second Ottawa Kombucha Festival will take place on July 21 at Lansdowne Park’s Horticulture Building. Local media has compared the event to the craft beer and wine festivals that have become popular in recent years and created a culture of making and drinking locally produced brews. These craft products draw on the popularity of local food as well as clever use of marketing tools like graphic design, social media, and flyer printing. If the organizers of “Boochfest” continue their success, bar patrons may soon be asking for local craft kombucha in the same way.
