At Old Tree Brewery, we use only the best, high-quality ingredients to make our botanical drinks. We purchase organic sencha green tea, organic, single-estate Assam black tea, and organic, biodiversity-enhancing, carbon-neutral sugar. All the water we use in our brews comes from right below our feet, straight out of the chalk aquifer, and it's then double-filtered to keep out anything bad while keeping in everything good.

For ingredients we cannot source locally, we do the research to ensure we are purchasing ethically sourced ingredients from local suppliers like HISBE.

We often use Sussex foraged ingredients like lavender and rosehips to flavour our drinks, or source our ingredients from local suppliers, or our own Drink Forest Garden at Rock Farm.

We are still a very small scale brewery, so we use 2 stainless steel fermenters and four oak barrels to make our kombucha brews. We use small batch brewing methods and traditional fermentation techniques to create a delicious kombucha. After the kombucha is brewed, we flavour our drinks by distilling and using our own hydrosols. A hydrosol is a water solution made from plants containing a mix of botanical essential oils and flavour compounds. We use a handcrafted alembic copper still from Portugal to hydrodistill botanicals and fruit.

After flavouring, the next step is bottling. Believe it or not, we use a manual bottling and capping machine so it is all done by hand! Once the kombucha is all bottled, then begins the carbonation process. We leave the kombucha to continue to ferment inside the bottles and build up pressure and bubbles, making our drinks delightfully fizzy.

Once the kombucha has finished carbonating, we hand-label them and put the new stock in a walk-in fridge kept below 5C to pause the fermentation process.