GO KOMBUCHA NAKED
AS WE CONTINUE to map out a new way forward while we continue to find a buyer who will honour the heritage and legacy we have built since 2003 — i.e. real, authentic kombucha in glass bottles — we’re pleased to announce that over the autumn and winter we’ll be brewing and hand-bottling small batches of all our varieties to maintain stock levels.
Exactly the same quality GO Kombucha made to the same authentic recipe and exacting standards that we’ve supplied for over 23 years. However, to make this financially viable and to keep costs down in light of the new packaging tax, for the foreseeable future we’ll be hand-filling each individual bottle — with the bottle label, batch number and sell-by date applied to the outer case.
The bottles themselves will be unlabelled due to the additional prohibitive cost of printing labels for small batches compared to machine-bottled runs of up to 9000 bottles, with bottle caps colour-coded in the variety packs. You’ll still continue receiving the same delicious taste and benefits of drinking the UK’s top-rated kombucha range — just naked!
Our ‘naked bottles’ will start rolling out from mid-October and will be clearly flagged as such on our online shop pages!
SERIOUS INQUIRIES ONLY
In the meantime we invite interest for the purchase of our business or investment to help us take GO Kombucha into retail to disrupt a sector defined by hyper-processed variants and fake “kombucha”-in-name only brands (see below)...
For a copy of our sales prospectus and information email info@gokombucha.co.uk (strictly no private equity inquiries — we are looking for an authentic purchaser who will continue GO Kombucha’s fine tradition of brewing real kombucha in glass bottles!
Gary Leigh, GO Kombucha Founder 2003-26
HERE’S WHY THE U.K. NEEDS GO KOMBUCHA IN GLASS BOTTLES…
A visit to any large supermarket reveals the sorry state the UK “kombucha” sector is in today; an unregulated “Wild West” of hyper-processed variants and fake labels not in compliance with UK labelling regulations which shamelessly lie to consumers who are misled into believing they are buying ‘the real thing’.
Stacks of weird, canned concoctions piled high, which state “kombucha” on the tin but which — like cheap supermarket “sour dough” bread — are anything but; pale imitations, synthesised laboratory concoctions and weird pretenders to the throne all fraudulently claiming to be something they are not.
The biggest giveaway being you don’t need to venture to the refrigerated aisle to find these cowboy brands. They are piled high in the ambient section having been industrially hyper-processed to remain stable in all temperatures and storage conditions.
This means they’ll have had most of their beneficial microbes filtered away. Or pasteurised/heat-treated once the can is sealed, yielding an inert concoction of limited benefit but long shelf life. And often claiming to be sugar free while sweetened with stevial glucosides and/or erythritol which can irritate the gut lining, causing cramps, bloating and diarrhea — the antithesis of what kombucha is.
ALUMINIUM AND MICROPLASTICS CONTAMINATION
Worryingly, exposing these ‘Frankenbooch’ beverages to heat when pasteurised and stored out of the chiller vastly accelerates aluminium corrosion via the can lining’s porous polymer plastic coating. Heat also exacerbates microplastics contamination.
A 2024 study into aluminium leeching of sour beer — closest to kombucha in terms of numbers of live bacteria and yeast — shows the potential for aluminium leeching to be way above the trace amounts that corrode into other low pH beverages like Coca Cola and Red Bull.
When drunk, trace amounts of aluminium accumulate throughout the body — including breaching the blood-brain barrier — depending how many cans are drunk each day. These can eventually reach potentially harmful levels over time, but because the kombucha sector is still in its infancy no research is yet verifiable over the long-term.
Consuming two or more cans a day could, therefore, pose a ticking time bomb of health problems, not least diseases related to the brain like Alzheimer’s and dementia. Read more here.
WHY OUR PRICES HAVE INCREASED
You may have noticed our bottle prices creeping up. This is due in part to the new net zero "new glass bottle tax" as part of the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) packaging scheme, which shifts the cost of collecting and recycling waste from local councils to the companies that make and use packaging. Fees are passed on to manufacturers based on how much the packaging weighs and how easy it is to recycle.
Because glass is much heavier than plastic or aluminium, it faces significantly higher charges that have added 4p to a 250ml bottle and 11p to the price of a large bottle of GO Kombucha — disproportionately far higher than the levy applied to cans due to the weight. We consider this an additional cost worth paying to maintain GO Kombucha in glass bottles, as it has been for over 23 years. We will never switch to cans!
Read how the EPR tax hit the beer manufacturing sector over the. summer’s world cup here
OTHER ADDITIONAL COSTS
The ongoing overheads we’ve incurred in keeping our stock chilled while effectively being out of operation for most of the last three months have also hit us, and so very reluctantly we have had to apply our flat rate £5.99 + VAT delivery charge across the board to each individual order to help recoup our escalating costs in all areas.
Note: a 750ml bottle of ‘Boathouse Kombucha’ costing £4.99 in 2003 would cost £9.80 in today’s money, and compared to other bottled kombuchas — like MOMO (£4.50/330ml), Zaks (£4.20/250ml) and £10+ for 750ml glass bottles sold on Ocado — GO Kombucha (750ml/£6.99) remains the best value, authentic UK kombucha in a glass bottle by far!