Virginia’s first hard kombucha bar is like a boozy science lab at the state fair

The young couple had come in looking for a simple cup of coffee. What they got instead was a drink that likely doesn’t exist anywhere else in Virginia.

“Did you want to try some of our hard kombucha?” asked manager Josef Kruger, his hand lingering on the tap handle.

And suddenly, noontime got boozily experimental. The countertop filled with tartly alcoholic quaffs that were made from tea but tasted like peach cobbler or apple pie.

In a Williamsburg storefront so new its signs are still vinyl, Joker Brewing claims to be the first licensed maker of hard kombucha in Virginia. (Virginia Beach’s Wasserhund Brewing and Maha Kombucha have also collaborated on a hard kombucha.)

Since November, Joker has been selling a rainbow of hard booch out of the space it shares with another of owner Lance Zaal’s many businesses, 3-year-old King of Clubs coffee roasting.

Zaal got excited about hard kombucha, he said, because it was “uncharted territory.” It was also, perhaps, part of his family’s alcohol legacy: His family once owned a brewery in Toronto.

“I’ve always wanted to make something alcoholic just because I’ve always found that to be more fun,” he said. “And in part it was because no one else was doing kombucha. So I thought that would be a good opportunity to introduce it.”

Nonalcoholic kombucha is nothing new to Western states, where it’s long been a fixture, though it remains a novel drink to most in Virginia. The drink is fermented from tea into an earthy, acidic, fizzy, lightly fruity-tasting concoction with a taste somewhere between earthy lemonade and zingy iced tea. Though the fermentation process is somewhat similar to wine or beer, the resulting drink is usually only as alcoholic as a bottle of O’Doul’s.

A few other local kombuchas, including Norfolk’s Red Mushroom and Virginia Beach’s Maha, can easily be found around the area.

But kombucha like Joker’s, with enough alcohol to get you tipsy, remains rare. Only around a couple dozen companies in the country make the stuff — and some of these are simply low-alcohol kombucha mixed with neutral liquor, much like a bottled cocktail.

“I think of that as cheating,” said Zaal, who says their fermentation is entirely natural. He won’t reveal the procedure in its entirety, but said they spent more than a year developing a two-stage process to ferment their kombucha out to a higher alcohol content, around 6%.

The resulting booch can be difficult to describe, mostly because there’s so little to compare it to. It’s lightly tart without the pucker, in a rainbow of often fruity flavors that tend toward the sweet — with few signals to your tongue that you might be buzzed by the end of your five-deep flight.

Like mead, seltzer and much other alternative hooch, it is a sweetly alcoholic something, and it’s not quite like the other stuff, and for now it mostly tastes like the flavors they put in it.

Especially the apple pie at Joker tastes like its namesake, a mix of apple flavor and baking spice that offers a sweetly in-your-face wallop of liquid Willie Wonka. The peach cobbler is a bit more subdued, but also pretty accurate. Its lighter dryness also makes it more amenable to drinking full glasses.

Of the fruit flavors, the mango-passionfruit “Laugh It Up” comes on as perhaps the most balanced, with a semi-dry character but a pleasantly lingering passionfruit aftertaste. The ginger-spiked “Nothing Really Matters” is also relatively restrained, perhaps closest to a nonalcoholic kombucha in its tartness and light bite. And for the record, the nonalcoholic Joker kombucha is admirably sippable, without the funk and vinegar of more aggressive renditions.

But the hard kombucha flavors rotate, and every flavor here is still under negotiation because the substance itself is new. And in general, there’s an experimental quality to the Joker and King of Clubs space — like gambling, say.

Comfort with novelty and risk also fall in line with its owner’s biography. On 9/11, while still 17 years old, the California-born Zaal rushed to enlist in the Marines. He served in three deployments that included a station in one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces. While still enrolled at the College of William & Mary after his service, he founded a nonprofit sending care packages to troops.

Now he’s a prolific serial entrepreneur, with businesses that include a startup incubator called Ignition and multiple tour companies across the country. For a ghost-tour company, Zaal recently closed on the Lizzie Borden House in Massachusetts.

“That’s kept me busy,” he said, with a sigh familiar to anyone who’s worked on historical properties, whose Byzantine legal paperwork might make 40 whacks seem like a reprieve. “I think I did something for People magazine yesterday. And then I was on ‘Inside Edition’ this morning.”

His ambitions for the coffee and kombucha companies already stretch well beyond Williamsburg to Richmond, North Carolina and nationwide.

“We’re looking to move into a 10,000-square-foot production space geared toward distribution and large-scale production,” Zaal said. He plans indoor retail, a patio and copious seating.

But for now, the little tasting room has the décor of a bare-bones start-up. You could fly a paper plane from the seats of the bar where you order your booch to the whirring machine where King of Clubs’ head roaster might be tending a batch of second-crack beans.

The arrangement is rare enough that most tend to have something to say about it, said business manager Kruger.

“I’ve had people from Seattle, from Austin, from all over the country come in and say, ‘OK, I’ve never seen anything like this. I’ve seen a roaster before, but not in this setup. I’ve never seen a coffee and kombucha in the same facility like this.’ And it blows their mind,” Kruger said.

Even the coffee is broadly experimental, making the place feel less like a café or taproom than a science lab at the state fair.

In addition to single-origin roasts and blends from light to dark, King of Clubs sells ice cream latte floats, coffee with toasted marshmallows, coffee infused with CBD derived from cannabis, beer-barrel aged cold brew, coffee siphons, and dry-ice cold brews with carbon dioxide steam that coils like Star Trek mist above the surface of the coffee. (The dry ice is separated from the drink within plastic housing, for the safety of all concerned.)

The kombucha can also be ordered infused with CBD, should you like an especially relaxing cup of tea in a growler to go. Hard kombucha slushies are also on hand.

And the experiments continue.

While we watched on a windy Saturday, Kruger staged yet another demonstration, one not quite yet ready for the general public. Using a blowtorch, he carefully flamed a cone of fresh-made pink cotton candy above the mad-seeming science of the “smoking” dry-ice coffee. Hardened red strands of sugar curled away from the flame, showering into and around the cup.

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But this time, the experiment went awry: Too much torch.

“We’re still working on that one,” Kruger said by way of apology, as their roaster ran outside into the parking lot with a still-smoldering candy cone. “Right now we’re just making a mess.”

Matthew Korfhage, 757-446-2318, matthew.korfhage@pilotonline.com

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If you go

The location: King of Clubs Brewing, and Joker Brewing, 113 Palace Lane, Williamsburg

Contact: 844-492-8379, kocbrewing.com, jokerbrewing.com

Hours: 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Friday, noon to 9 p.m. Saturday, noon to 6 p.m. Sunday.