ABOUT US
Our story
Our story began as a classic fairy tale - in America :) That is where Vladimir, a doctoral student in history, saw kombucha on the shelves of health-food stores and was reminded of his childhood in Ukraine and fermented drinks traditionally made by his grandmother. During the many days and nights that it took to write 600 pages of his doctoral dissertation, he started to experiment with making kombucha, and enriched his "Doctor of Philosophy" degree with another title, Dr. Scoby, named after the SCOBY probiotic culture (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast), which is the element of kombucha. Love brought him from the US to Croatia, where he launched his craft brewery, Dr. Scoby and invented CROBUCHA KOMBUCHA, the first Croatian brand that merges kombucha, the ancient health elixir originating from Asia, with the herbs and fruits ecologically grown on Croatian islands and by small, local producers.
How we work?
Our key principles are: authenticity, transparency, simplicity and social and ecological awareness. We hand-make every batch of kombucha, in small quantities and using high-quality Japanese, Chinese, and Indian teas together with ingredients sourced from local producers dedicated to ecological farming whenever possible. Our aim is to develop long-term and mutually supportive collaborations with small businesses, local farmers, non-profit organizations, creative shops and restaurants, whose work we support and believe in. We are inspired by the socially engaged work of the non-profit organization Vestigium, and their Saturday farmers' market which provided us with the very first opportunity to present our kombucha to buyers, and where we had the chance to meet many other local producers. We have also been amazed by the work of Pjover, a non-profit whose mission of revitalizing the eco-village Velo Grablje on the island of Hvar we support by donating 0.5 HRK from every sold bottle of kombucha with lavender. The self-grown sage from the Kornati archipelago is sourced from our partner Salvia Kornati and is an irreplaceable ingredient of our kombucha with sage. We are always interested in new stories and new collaborations - please contact us!
Recipes
Kombucha — the mix of sweet-and-sour, fermented tea and probiotic cultures — is tasty in itself and we believe that it should not be overly "jumbled" with innumerable exotic additions, aromas and flavors, which is the direction taken by the global market. We are minimalists: one tea (black ili green, not both), one medicinal herb or fruit, one signature color - this is the formula for all of the five flavors (except the "dual" lemon-ginger). This clarity, however, was the result of a long period of experimenting and searching for the perfect coupling of a specific kind of high-quality black and green teas and the locally widespread herbs and fruit, which is also a blend of two cultures, the Euro-Asian and Balkan-Mediterranean, since the "tea" in our region was made from medicianal herbs, and not from the Camellia sinensis plant, from which "green" and "black" teas were derived in China.
We are also clear when alcohol is concerned — we want Crobucha Kombucha to truly be a non-alcoholic drink, which means that we make sure that the alcohol percentage remains below 0.5%. To the naturally occurring fizziness of kombucha we add a small amount of additional carbonization precisely in order to stabilize the percentage of alcohol, which could otherwise easily rise above 1% and more. (We will leave these and higher percentages for our version of Dr. Scoby "hard kombucha").
And, of course, we don't pasteurize — we believe that only raw kombucha can rightly bear the kombucha name. Don't worry: our kombucha has passed all microbiological analyses, and in the bottle you will encounter only the "good" bacteria that will contribute to the health of your microbiome.
CHEERS!