Saturday Farmers’ Market Vendor Feature: Craftwilder

This week, we are featuring Craftwilder, a Chilliwack-based local company that makes kombucha with hand-picked, ethically harvested, wild ingredients! Their super refreshing kombucha also contains no refined sugars, and has little-to-no carbonation. We had a chance to chat with the owner, Ian, and ask him some questions.

What exactly is kombucha? What benefits does it offer?

Kombucha is essentially tea fermented using a SCOBY (a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast). The SCOBY culture consumes the sweetener, which in our product is local unpasteurized honey, and in the process, produces gluconic acid, lactic acid, acetic acid and other digestive enzymes. This is great for our bodies as it helps sustain and support our digestive and immune systems as well as gives us a bit of an energy boost. Most people don’t realize that most of our health actually stems from our gut so if we have good gut health, generally speaking, the rest of our body will follow suit.

Additionally, we’ve coupled our kombucha with ingredients that are considered highly medicinal, although we don’t advertise our product as a medicinal product. We harvest our ingredients ourselves and use a lot of quite uncommon ingredients, which is why we we also bring books to the market that show more information and evidence about the plants and the ecosystems they grow in.

What types of ingredients do you use and what flavours do you currently offer?

Over the years, I’ve produced over 250 different flavours using ingredients such as rhizomes, flowers, tree foliage, berries, nuts, and mushrooms. Generally speaking, there’s no limit to what can be harvested and what can be used.

We like to change our flavours with the seasons and with what’s available. Our current flavours are Grand Fir, Yellow Cedar, Mixed Wildflower, Elder flower, Devil’s Club, Mixed Berry and Black Locust Flower. They also have three new flavours coming in the next market so go check them out and try them for yourself! Stop on by their stall to also hear an explanation of the benefits of each flavour.

Which flavours are the most popular?

Our flavours are quite even in popularity. I enjoy different ones at various times depending on how I am feeling and how my body is feeling. I personally really enjoy the Devil’s Club and have it almost everyday both topically and internally. I find that it brings me to an equilibrium and allows me to focus throughout my day a little bit better as well. The Wild Berry and the Grand Fir are also quite popular.

How do you brew your kombucha with little to no carbonation? A lot of store-bought kombucha is quite carbonated and very sweet.

Part of our procedure is actually limiting the amount of carbonation, which is why we classify our kombucha as little-to-no carbonation. We don’t do a second ferment of our kombucha and we don’t add enough sweetener to actually produce an excessive amount of carbonation. Before we bottle it, we also cool it to help further prevent carbonation build-up. A lot of other companies do a second ferment in the bottle and will often add more sweetener to their kombucha.

Our most carbonated kombucha would most likely be our Berry flavour, which sits at 5 – 10% carbonation compared to other kombuchas on the market. Our kombuchas take from 6 days to 8 weeks to ferment, depending on the properties of the ingredients used.

Is there anything else you want your customers to know about Craftwilder?

We harvest our own ingredients so we really want to promote the sustainability and harvesting of intact ecosystems. Protecting our resources is very important so we take the time to harvest regeneratively and ethically without destroying any of the ecosystems or disrupting them. We want to make sure there’s enough there for First Nations and for others like myself who want to go out and visually enjoy or use these ingredients in topical or food products. Our wild ingredients are free of the intentional spraying of biochemicals, pesticides and fertilizers which can leach into our foods and is related to a lot of illnesses.

Does your name hold any special meaning behind it?

There is an intention behind the name- my position as a harvester is commonly referred to as a wildcrafter, which is somebody who harvests a lot of wild ingredients and crafts something out of it whether it’s food or topical products. I switched the words around and that’s how the Craftwilder name was invented!

Craftwilder can be found at the UBC Farm Saturday Farmers’ Market on the following dates: Aug 03, Aug 10, Aug 31, Sep 14, Oct 05, Nov 02, Nov 23. For more information on Craftwilder, check out the following links: Website | Facebook | Instagram.