I sat down with William Esslinger of Confluence Kombucha in St. Louis, Missouri. We’d just left the three-day KBI conference in Barcelona and were having lunch at Munich Airport before catching our respective connecting flights. It was William’s first time in Germany, if you count being in an airport transit lounge as being in a country. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation. The full audio is available as a podcast at the end of this post.

The Confluence Kombucha Fermentory & Ping Pong Club is located at The Fox Den, 2501 S. Jefferson Avenue, Suite 102, St. Louis, MO 63104. It is open from 11 a.m.–7 p.m. Thursday through Sunday. Confluence Kombucha is also a regular vendor at the Tower Grove Farmers’ Market.

Booch News: How did you discover kombucha?

I started brewing kombucha in 2009 and working in kitchens all in a span of three days. I’d graduated with my master’s in media literacy education, and wanted to teach about the constructs of media and how to use media, how to create with different kinds of media, video, photography, using sound, all that kind of stuff. And so that’s my background.

But I couldn’t find a job, so I started working as a dishwasher at age 29. I was making six bucks an hour with a master’s degree.

I ordered my first kombucha culture online. I’d been drinking kombucha for about a year and a half prior to that, and it basically healed my ulcers that I’d had since I was five years old. That kombucha completely healed it. I haven’t had any incidents since. I can still remember as a young person having so much pain all the time. Every single day, a burning, like an ice pick in my intestines, every time I ate.

I had this severe problem. And it then drinking kombucha cured it. So, I tell people, if you really want to do this kombucha thing, you need to be drinking it. Every day. Maybe take a day off here and there. But when people start, if they’re very used to a crappy diet, they’re going to feel a little worse, maybe because they’re flushing out stuff. But you get such a vibe out of drinking every day.

That was just the beginning of the healing journey with kombucha. So much more healing has happened physically and mentally through this process. Just living with the SCOBYs every day. I didn’t really think about it as a business.

BN: How did your career in catering take off?

I’d started working in kitchens, and graduated from dish washing to working as a chef. After about three months of dish washing, they had me come on as a prep chef during the day. It was a big corporate restaurant, and I got pretty bored with it, but I had met someone I went to photography school with. He was opening a new restaurant called Blood & Sand with one of the top chefs in St. Louis at the time. He gave me a job, saying they can’t pay much, but they gave me an education. I got the last cook position on the line. And they didn’t really know what to do with me because I was brand-new, even though I’m almost 30 now. They said they would treat me like I knew nothing. And that was the best education. On-the-job training.

BN: How did your career in the culinary world prepare you to run a kombucha business?

We started fermenting stuff right away. They wanted me to make some kimchi. The chef didn’t know how to do it. But I had spent a couple of years in Korea and learned when I was over there. And I had just started brewing kombucha. It started to feel like fermentation was my path. Food was my path. And since it cured my ulcers, I started to be able to eat all the things I was never able to eat. I never thought of becoming a chef or anything like that because food was such a pain point for me.

Then they started handing me the pastry stuff. Because they were all line cooks. They didn’t want to deal with this finicky shit with the temperature and all that. It didn’t fit in with everything else. But my background in photography, doing black and white film developing, the exacting process, the temperature, was already there for me.

They started giving me one little project at a time. And they’re like, this kid’s nailing it, right? So they basically just made me a pastry chef. And I was making like $10 an hour, which was great.

BN: How did working in the kitchens lead to opening a commercial kombucha business?

I kept working in restaurants. And then, I finally thought maybe I got something here with the kombucha. I was developing flavors from the beginning. I kept all my notes. I now have over 800 flavors. I’ve got a spreadsheet of everything I’ve been doing since we opened our doors. Before I left for this trip, I did three new kombuchas in one week. I’ve been doing everything on draft and kegs since we opened our brick-and-mortar in 2016. It’s been all kegs. The idea was just to have a tap room.

And the first iteration was a tap room/restaurant. And so, for five years, I ran the restaurant and did the fermentation on-site. It was 1,000 square feet. It was super tiny. The whole thing. I had 15 seats if you really pushed it tight in the inside of the restaurant. And we had some patio seating in the front and the back, with a little garden where we would grow herbs and other things we would use in the kombucha as well.

A lot of people were dropping in. We got a lot of recognition. We didn’t know what kombucha would be like in St. Louis. I knew I could run a restaurant, and I had good ideas. The restaurant took front seat for most of that time. It was more of a restaurant with a little bit of kombucha. We had eight taps going, so you could come in and do an eight-flight or a four-flight, then take stuff to go, filling pints, quarts, and growlers.

When COVID happened, my business partner decided to split. I closed the restaurant and started focusing on kombucha. So it’s only really been four years of focusing on the brewery.

BN: What is Confluence Kombucha like today?

We’re in the second iteration right now. There was a brewery, a kombucha brewery in St. Louis called KomBlu, that opened in the space that I’m in now. And they closed. And then another brewery opened in there, and then they closed. And then the building’s owner called me. He said, ‘We have this defunct kombucha brewery if you’d like to come look at it’. It had a bunch of stainless-steel vessels, a reverse-osmosis filter, and a huge cooler. So we did a bit of renovation and made it my own. I built the fermentation room. And then we opened that in leap year 2023. February 29th.

We also make other fermented products, like coconut yogurt and kimchi.

The volume is going up. We started bottling in this facility because we had the room. We’ve done 20,000 12-ounce bottles in 18 months. It’s a short-neck bottle that works because I don’t have to worry as much about it over-carbonating. It has a little bit of space. I think that’s really important. The bottles are cute, they’re fun. The labeling is really incredible. It’s playful and fun.

We have a 12-tap room with a ping-pong table and vinyl records. The fermentation happens in the back. People can come in on Thursday and return on Sunday, and the board will be different.

Flavors

Confluence bottles just four flavors.

The Pineapple Palo Santo won the Signature category at the World Kombucha Awards. The flavor combines fruity notes from pineapple with the coconut-like aroma of Palo Santo—a fragrant tree wood often used as incense—resulting in a tropical drink reminiscent of a piña colada.

Confluence Kombucha also won two other Awards for one-off flavors offered on tap that William had entered into the competition:

• Jun & Holy Basil (Gold for the Jun category)
• Paw Paw & Rum Barrel (Silver for the Fruits with Spices category)

Esslinger, who started bottling his kombucha a year ago, after a decade in business comments: “It was my first year competing, and I didn’t expect to win.”

At the competition, Esslinger found it exciting and validating to discover that some of his new ideas are very much in line with what’s happening globally. For example, he recently brewed kombucha using cypress tea and was able to compare notes with brewers from Slovenia who brought a kombucha they had made with cedar and spruce chips. “It was cool to get that nerd connection right away.”

Esslinger chose the name Confluence based on St. Louis geography–located at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers–but he says it has come to represent a larger vision, one that the World Kombucha Awards intensified. “As an artist and a food person inspired by world cuisines, the name has gathered more depth because it evokes something,” he says. “There’s a power in the idea of waterways merging, and we’re trying to uphold that every day in what we do.”

BN: Tell me about your flavors.

We have an Aronia Berry with Elderberry flavor. Aronia is the berry with the highest amount of antioxidants that grows in America. We met a local grower. And I loved it right away because it was so similar to the very first kombucha I had. Which was Cosmic Cranberry from GT’s. And the nickname for Aronia used to be Chokeberry. It’s a terrible name. But it’s so tannic that when you take it off the bush, you try to eat it. It chokes you up and dries out your mouth. But that’s the good stuff. We put the berries in the freezer to extract their flavor.

Another flavor is Watermelon and Blue Spirulina.

Ginger Lavender has been our bestseller for a very long time. We color that one with the butterfly pea flower. And it makes it bright violet and adds calcium to the beverage. I tell people that this was the flavor I never wanted to do. Because everybody was doing ginger. And everybody was asking me, Do you do ginger? Do you do lavender? And it took me 10 years to make this kombucha. And then it just started selling.

The base tea is Japanese sencha green tea. Because that’s toasty. You can taste the tea. It’s a very low-vibration kombucha. I like it because I can get my subtle flavors in there really, really easily. I landed on the green tea, because I feel like it’s a blank canvas. It gives me a really good place to work from. But then we’re, you know, we’re doing very small, tiny-batch stuff with other teas, just for fun.

I don’t sell an original, unflavored right now. Maybe in the future I would love to do that.

I like messing with all the crazy, different teas for myself and for the tap room, like Lapsang Souchong and the smoked black tea.

 I update my Instagram every day or at least every week.

I do have them all in a book. I have every single one that I’ve ever done in the book.

BN: Do you have ideas that just don’t work out? Like you think, oh, I’ll mix this and this and this, and then you taste it.

Not so much anymore. There are a few in there that just weren’t really great, but overall, I think I’ve got good ratios. I’ve just been doing it in such small batches for so long that, if I waste five gallons or three gallons, it’s no big deal.

And then we save the pellicle and make fruit leathers with it. The first one I did, I forgot about it for a year. And I pulled them out, and they were like, perfect. No preservatives or anything like that. Kids love them. I have a lady who comes by and buys about $50 worth of them every other week at the farmers’ market.

That comes from my chef background. And I think also, just like growing up poor. Trying to think about every way to utilize everything. And it’s actually really fun, and it’s a great story to tell people. Because they see me as a brewer in a different way. How I’m thinking about even the waste product.

People who are maybe skeptical or have their own ideas about a kombucha brewer or something. That sets them at ease a little bit more. Because I think kombucha is still very much a mystery to most people. And it’s still a mystery to me, in some ways, too.

BN: What are some of the unusual ferments you experimented with?

I’m most interested in using mushrooms as the base for my kombucha. And I see a synergy in the fermentation process that I don’t necessarily see in teas. Instead, it’s mushrooms made into tea: reishi, chaga, lion’s mane, and cordyceps. We just did one, the pheasant’s back, which is also known as the dryad’s saddle. I’ve done chanterelles They only ferment half the time.

BN: So you don’t need the caffeine?

No, the synergy, because they are so close that most of those fermentations take about half the time as my normal fermentations do. The only one that doesn’t is the chaga, and the chaga is the one that takes the longest to grow anyway. It tastes like a birch beer. Almost like a root beer.

BN: So what you’re doing is, instead of using camellia sinensis? You’re doing the primary fermentation with a mushroom extract?

With just mushroom tea and sugar, just throw in the SCOBY and some starter tea. And it tastes totally different. Oh my gosh, it’s ridiculous! Like chanterelles taste like apricots and peaches.

One of the wildest, funnest ones is a polypore one.

It’s a black-staining polypore where I make the tea, and it’s black tea. It turns black. And then, through fermentation, the scoby, the microbes, and everything clear the liquid so it’s not black anymore. It tastes tropical, like pineapples and guava. Nothing else. But when you make the tea, it smells like gravy. It smells so brothy and big like that. But then, at the end of fermentation, it tastes like pineapples. It’s really amazing.

We are also using honey with those mushrooms. I did a chanterelle with honey this year. And then we poured it off of nitro. And it was so soft, velvety, and creamy from the mushrooms.

The chaga mushroom ones take about three to six months. So I have one shelf that’s just dedicated to the chaga mushroom. And it’s incredible. It’s easily one of my favorite ones to work with. I don’t sell it outside the tap room.

BN: What plans do you have for the future?

I have 2,000 square feet. And so it’s not much, but it is just a brewery. I’m trying to increase quantities so I can continue doing it and feel like I can support a cast and a crew. In the future, I hope we will be distributed regionally, maybe in Chicago, Memphis, Nashville, and Kansas City. And yeah, I’d expect to be working with some of the high-end clients.

That’s what I have going for me already. I’m inspired by those worlds, and making pairings, tastings, and those kinds of things aren’t happening in the kombucha world. I’ve been doing that for a very long time. I have extensive experience creating menus and pairing food with kombucha. I think that’s the whole new level of what could be happening in the dining scenes. And I think it’s showing up. That’s just a fun place to be.

Even though it’s been 30 years since GT started his company, I still think there’s so much room to do a lot more fun stuff.

BN: Well, we both have flights to catch back to the States. Thanks a lot.

Listen to the podcast for the recording of the lunchtime interview with William in the transit lounge at Munich Airport.

The post Confluence Kombucha, St. Louis, Missouri appeared first on 'Booch News.