New hard kombucha brewery and taproom opens in Sacramento area. Check out the flavors
Beachy prints and splashy colors greet customers as they walk into Shorebirds Brewing Co.’s industrial park taproom in Rancho Cordova. It’s a sunny riff on the familiar warehouse brewery vibe, with flavors that add to that experience.
Shorebirds is the Sacramento region’s first alcoholic kombucha brewery and bar, with housemade boozy seltzers and teas to boot. Now in its second soft opening weekend at 11327 Trade Center Dr., Suite 355, it’s a regional pioneer for a beverage that’s become increasingly popular throughout California.
“Hard kombucha’s a new, growing category of alcoholic beverage, and I think we’re just the first ones (in the region) to kind of explore it and see where we can take it,” co-owner Randall Echevarria said.
Beer and hard kombucha have similar brewing processes, said Echevarria, who owns Shorebirds with his husband Monte Hudock The two worked at Pyramid Alehouse’s now-closed Sacramento brewpub in the early 2000s alongside Sabrina Helmick, their taproom manager at Shorebirds.
The difference is in the flavor, marked in kombucha and teas by fruits and botanicals (and soon, heat from cayenne peppers or jalapenos, Echevarria said). Shorebirds’ debut flavors include strawberry smoothie, blueberry mint, raspberry lemon ginger and the delightfully tangy mango margarita. They’re also making a boozy citrus green tea and lemon press seltzer, which are between 5.5% and 6.5% ABV like the rest of Shorebirds’ offerings.
Most of Echevarria and Hudock’s expertise is in another sort of brewing, though. They founded Brass Clover Cold Brew Coffee Co. from their Oak Park home in 2015, and grew it to eventually supply Temple Coffee Roasters as well as Sacramento and Bay Area offices. Though that project’s on hiatus for now, Echevarria and Hudock plan to eventually use Shorebirds’ fermentation tanks for cold brew as well.
Online alcohol delivery platform Drizly reported more than 2,000% growth in hard kombucha sales from 2019 to 2020, and brands such as JuneShine and Booch Craft have become ubiquitous in Sacramento-area grocery store beverage aisles.
“It’s exploding all over Southern California. (In) San Diego, it seems like every couple of months there’s another hard kombucha brewery opening,” Echevarria said. “It’s a growing category that people are interested in, and once they try it, they fall in love with it.”
Shorebirds’ brewery and taproom is in Rancho Cordova’s Barrel District, where a distillery and meadery flank five beer breweries. But throughout the Sacramento region, the craft beer brewery explosion that marked the early and mid-2010s has tapered off as drinkers have increasingly opted for alternative beverages.
KC Kombucha opened a bar in Oak Park in 2019, and Zeal Kombucha is produced just across the Light Rail tracks from Shorebirds (and will soon be carried on tap, Echevarria said). But both of those brands are nonalcoholic, leaving something to be desired for some customers over 21.
Kombucha, tea or seltzer are $6 per pint, or $12 for a quartet of five-ounce pours. Shorebirds will eventually can beverages in-house and sell them in four-packs, with beachy labels similar to Hudock’s artwork that hangs on the 1,600-square foot taproom walls.
“Shorebirds is all about living wild and being free, so we’re trying to evoke that spirit in everything that we do,” Echevarria said. “(Kombucha) is an exciting beverage, reminds me of summer. There’s a whole vibe that’s created around these beverages that we’ve tried to create in our taproom here.”
Shorebirds is open 5-10 p.m. Friday, 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Saturday and 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Sunday during its soft opening, with plans to eventually open on Wednesday and Thursday as well.
This story was originally published May 7, 2022 at 5:00 AM.