ABOUT
OUR DRINKS
We produce a range of handcrafted and small batch kombuchas and seasonal botanical drinks.
Kombucha
Kombucha is a low-alcohol drink with less sugar than most sodas or juices. Made by fermenting tea, it's akin in flavour to a light cider or perry. Old Tree Kombucha is known for its well-balanced full flavour, delicately floral with a tangy, appley sweetness and champagne-like character. Best enjoyed as a low alcohol option at social events, or as a digestive aid with a meal, it also makes an incredible cocktail mixer with gin, rum, and anything else you can throw at it!
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Seasonal
Offerings
We carefully source the ingredients in abundance and use traditional brewing techniques to create hedgerow wines, tasty cordials and potent drinking vinegars.
Old Tree Drinking Vinegars are drinking vinegars made from seasonal botanicals, twice a year for Autumn/Winter and for Spring/Summer. We carefully combine up to 20 botanicals into these elixirs, perfect for mixing in cocktails, diluting with sparkling or hot water, or having neat as a morning digestive booster.
Old Tree Cordials are a delight for the senses-- made to be diluted to taste, our shrub-style cordials capture the exciting flavours of the British landscape such as our Spring/Summer offering Nettle Kombucha Cordial and Mulled Kombucha Cordial in the Winter.
Old Tree Elderflower Sparkling Wine is the perfect celebration drink, produced in time to usher in the British summer months. This extraordinary drink is made with hand picked wild elderflowers from the sunny Sussex countryside at the peak of flowering season to create a heady, aromatic sparkling wine. This medium-dry, floral wine is sunshine in a bottle, evoking the best of the early summer. Pairs perfectly with a local cheese board.
Carefully curated ingredients
At Old Tree Brewery, we use only the best, high-quality ingredients to make our botanical drinks. We purchase organic sencha green tea, organic, single-estate Assam black tea, and organic, biodiversity-enhancing, carbon-neutral cane sugar. All the water we use in our brews is drawn from a chalk aquifer right below our feet and then filtered through a nanoceramic filter followed by a kinetic degradation fluxion filter with granular activated carbon, which keep in the minerals while taking out anything that might interfere with our live culture.
We often use Sussex-foraged ingredients like mugwort and rosehips to flavour our drinks, or source our ingredients from local growers, or our own Drink Forest Gardens.
For ingredients we cannot directly source locally, we do the research to ensure we are purchasing ethically sourced ingredients from local suppliers like HISBE and The Seasons.
How we make our drinks
We are still a very small scale brewery, so we use 2 fermenters to make our kombucha brews. We use small batch brewing methods and traditional fermentation techniques to create a delicious kombucha. After the kombucha is brewed, we flavour our drinks by distilling our own hydrosols. A hydrosol is a water solution made from plants containing a mix of botanical essential oils and flavour compounds. We use a handcrafted alembic copper still from Portugal to steam and hydrodistill botanicals and fruit.
