HOW IT ALL BEGAN pt.3: THE GREAT BOOCH RECALL

THREE YEARS into running the label, things were ticking along as a cottage industry.

Associates of Peter and Linda- who’d sold their boat house in ‘05 for £0.5m and moved to a châteaux in France - were at this point making kombucha to Peter’s authentic recipe in a lock-up in Slough and selling to me to order. It was Hollywood wild child Lindsay Lohan and her ❤️ of kombucha that proved to be the turning point…

In early ‘07 Lohan was arrested for breaching terms of her parole license when her ABV bracelet linked to her local LAPD went off. Swearing blind it was set off by the (typically) trace amount of alcohol in the health drink she carried around with her almost religiously, the story quickly permeated UK women’s magazines, with most weeklies featuring Lohan clutching @synergykombucha on their covers.

For me this was manna from heaven, and just the break I needed. Sales quadrupled overnight and the phone buzzed around the clock from journalists wanting to know more, and some featuring Boathouse Kombucha in their pages (swipe).

It was a boost that enabled me to be able to afford to take my still commercially unique kombucha range to the next level, and the rest as they say is history! So thank you as well to Lindsay Lohan for helping us along the way to reach our 20th birthday!

Not so fortunate for the US kombucha brewing industry was the escapade put kombucha brands - still in their infancy - on the map and in the spotlight for the first time for their varying alcohol levels.

When several bottles were spotted fizzing through their caps on a Wholefoods’ shelf in the summer of 2010 and found to contain up to 3% alcohol, a national recall of all kombucha products was issued.

Brewers that hadn’t mastered balancing their brews to ensure the bacteria were always one step ahead of the yeasts were forced to reformulate via filtration and/or pasteurisation, or to close down altogether…