Rachel Swan of the East Bay Express traces kombucha's recent decline, after the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau posted an online warning that drinks with an alcohol content of .5 percent and higher are, technically, booze. (Some commercial kombuchas clock in at .6 or .7 percent.) Cue the voluntary product pulls from shelves at Whole Foods and other stores. Swan:
Admittedly ... a difference of .1 or .2 percent alcohol by volume isn't enough to get you drunk. For comparison, Coors Light contains about 4.3 percent, while many Belgian trappist ales exceed 9 percent. Kombucha now straddles a thin line between being a bona fide health food beverage and the weakest malt brew on the planet. That's put the producers in an awkward position. Meanwhile, the recalls threaten to drain their personal coffers.For her part, SFoodie's Tamara Palmer has been cultivating reaction by local kombucha makers. Late last month, House Kombucha's Rana Chang publicly reflected on the voluntary ban. "I do think more study should be done on the matter because all live products naturally ferment on the shelf," Rana told Palmer by e-mail. "Even a picked orange ferments in its own rind sitting in a crate. No one goes around testing every live product to see if it's under .5% ABV [alcohol by volume]. I believe properly made and stored locally produced kombucha can be easily kept under 1% alcohol. But splitting hairs over fractions of less than 1% is probably a lost cause when dealing with live food."
Food Carts Portland will be your Bible on this epic eating journey. That's what it was for us recently, taunting us with the impossibility of checking out everything that sounded intriguing, whether Bosnian, Caribbean, Czech, German, Korean, Thai, vegan, or just weird.
SFoodie: How did Mendocino Red Tail Ale lead to the creation of Magnolia?
McLean: Beers from pioneering California craft breweries (Sierra Nevada, Anchor Steam, and Red Tail) started showing up on the East Coast in Grateful Dead show parking lots, carted across the country in VW buses.... I was happily delving into craft beer by checking out local brewpubs ... but, honestly, I think the Northern California beer I was drinking thanks to the underground economy in Dead lots was what really got me excited.
I went to a lot of shows in '90 and '91 before moving to S.F. in the fall of '91. By the time I got out here, I was already a huge fan of the local beer scene. I walked into the homebrew shop out on Taraval (since closed) and told them I wanted to make something like Red Tail. They set me up with everything I needed, but, not only did the result not taste like Red Tail but it wasn't very good at all, either. Still, it begat an instantaneous obsession with brewing and the simmering of ideas that later manifested as Magnolia.
Which do you prefer, the physicality of brewing down in the basement, or the sociability of the street-level bar? They're interconnected, and time in the brewery nearly always includes some work that takes place behind the bar, too, like tapping casks, switching out beers, cleaning lines, etc. One of the things I love best about Magnolia and brewpubs in general is the close connection between brewery, kitchen, and pub. It makes brewing very similar to cooking for people, in that we can see immediate reactions to whatever we've been working on.
Ashbury owner Resat Turgut says that, like Thursdays, the market's Tuesday dinners are an experiment to scope neighborhood demand. And he says he'd like to extend the experiment to other nights of the week ― like, potentially, seven, with different groups of vendors selling on different nights. For tomorrow, Adobo Hobo's Jason Rotairo says the company's usual chicken leg adobo will be on offer, as well as adobo tacos. Something new, too: achara, jars of Philippines-style pickled carrots, the recipe courtesy of Rotairo's grandma from Cavite.
We're a sucker for finding new snacks such as Mami's Crunch, chips made out of okara (soy pulp) and the Cal-Moroccan twist of preserved Meyer lemons from Mo-Foods. We went wild on hot food options, including hearty banh mi burgers and rock shrimp chips with shaved chocolate by KitchenSidecar, gyoza from Saucy Dumplings, and held back from inhaling all the sweets, though PieTISSERIE's salted chocolate cream pie with pretzel crust proved too mighty to resist.
Of course, the Mission doesn't do anything that isn't culturally expressive, whether of La Raza or of skater boys with neckbeards. So it stands to reason that, after the need for a market emerged from the Mission Streetscape Plan last fall, the neighborhood would solicit buy-in from a diversity of groups. Long, meeting-filled story short: The Mission Community Market Collaborative was spawned last November, with help from La Cocina, MEDA, the Mission Merchants Association, and others. Logistics planning started in March.
