Meet our Makers: Mason Bagios of Kommunity Brew

Mason Bagios is the CEO & Founder of Kommunity Brew, a Western Australian based brewery manufacturing the freshest, highest quality, authentic kombucha and water-kefir in Australia.

With herbal and wholefood ingredients at the forefront of their brewed beverages, they take broadly cherished drinks and think outside the box, using their herbal encyclopaedia to invent new and delightful flavours.

They do all of this while running a highly sustainable and environmentally friendly business - all of their products are sustainably packaged and created in their solar powered brewery.

C&C: Hi Mason! Can you tell us a bit about the early days of Kommunity Brew? Where did the idea come from and how did the business get started?

Mason: Before Kommunity Brew, I managed bars and bottle shops for a major liquor group. I was 22 and I’d gone through a life change to get into wholefoods and health because I’d seen that alcohol could be pretty devastating to people’s lives. So, I went through a transformation and decided to study nutrition. As part of that, I left my job and started working at a popular wholefoods store in Fremantle called Manna Wholefoods.

In the same week that I started working there, I was joined by my now co-founder Jarred. He was working fifo in the mines at the time and wanted to leave that industry and look after his wellbeing. He started studying naturopathy and I started studying nutrition and then we both started this job within a fortnight of each other. We worked for two years as colleagues and quickly became best friends. We loved the industry and the space and I suggested that we go into business together. I’m very passionate about Australia’s drinking culture and what that means - why do we always circulate around alcohol? I questioned whether we could make something that was an alternative to alcohol. Keep in mind, this was around 2014 - so this isn’t recent history. We were making kombucha at home at the time because it was a part of our wholefoods lifestyle. We realised that while there were all the gut health benefits with kombucha, it was actually a really good party and social drink too that acts as a replacement for beer. 

We started getting tight with the home brewing community, making our own kombucha in bigger batches and door knocking. By door knocking, I mean literally going around to people and saying ‘hey, we’ve made this kombucha - would you like to try it’? These were basically lemonade stand level sales, just to see if people would give it a go. Similarly, we went to farmers markets and pitched kombucha as a non-alcoholic beverage. We encouraged people to take it to their BBQs or Sunday sessions on the weekend and to drink it instead of beer. Our whole thought process was to make Sunday sessions healthy and to fill the BBQ esky with good stuff. This approach evolved into what has now become our company mission for the last ten years, which is to change Australia’s drinking culture. 

C&C: Can you tell us some more about this mission? What does it mean for you in the context of Kommunity Brew?

Mason: It’s central to us and it’s even in the name - the reason we went for ‘Kommunity Brew’ as an identity and brand name is to communicate that we’re one for all and all for one. We’re really for the idea of the family table, the wider community and being inclusive. Everything we make is a brewed drink - whether it’s a tea brew or a coffee brew - it always involves this brewing or fermentation process. The idea is to make healthy options in these gathering scenarios really inclusive. Kombucha was our first product and we’ve obviously expanded beyond there, but the whole idea is around filling up that family esky with healthy options. 

I’d love to say in ten years time that non-drinkers aren’t just getting juice and soda at these gatherings. If that norm is broken, then I feel like our mission has been actualised.

C&C: Can you tell us a bit about how the kombucha is made - do you have a special fermentation process or method of brewing your kombucha?

Mason: We’ve tried to stick to a grassroots approach in the way that it’s made. We make it just like you would at home, but with far larger equipment. The brewing process is as any home brewer would expect it to be, but take your three litre jar from your countertop and put it in a one thousand litre tank. We use the same scoby we’ve used for ten years. We don’t use fresh ‘juices’ for flavours, we use herbal and wholefood ingredients. So we’ll boil up ginger and turmeric root or raspberry leaf and derive all of our flavours from natural ingredients and sources. We use what are essentially big kettles that are brewing these herbs and spices and creating a really strong herbal tea that we then add to our kombucha. This approach is actually a bit of a throwback to Jarred’s background in naturopathy. We wanted to incorporate some of our herbal medicine education into the recipes, because it helps with the complexity of flavour and might also help to spur the health transformation that people have long term. 

C&C: Speaking of those flavours, there are some really inventive and great flavours in the Kommunity Brew products, with products like the Tropical Hops kombucha and the Lavender Chamomile Water Kefir. How do you go about creating these flavours? 

Mason: We like to anchor in something that is fairly broad-reaching. For example, Ginger Turmeric is our longest brewed flavour. Ginger beer is fairly commonplace in an esky and we wanted to work out how to make it healthier, so we decided to add things like turmeric and cayenne to the recipe. We also think about it from a synergy point of view - people want to drink ginger beer because they love the flavour, so we thought to make a ginger beer but to add an anti-inflammatory component. We know that ginger and turmeric pair really well flavour wise and we also know that if you add some black pepper you get more absorption of the turmeric. If you throw some cayenne in there, it amplifies the heat (which is sensory) - so it’s a mixture of using the ingredients in a synergistic way for both a flavour and experience benefit and a nutritional benefit. 

It’s the same with our Raspberry Blossom flavour. Raspberry sodas are fairly common in the mainstream, but we didn’t want to just make a raspberry soda. We wanted to achieve the delicious raspberry flavour with a bit more complexity and an added herbal element. So we decided to use raspberry leaf as the primary ingredient, then used hibiscus to get that rich raspberry colour and rosehip for a more tart flavour. In herbal tea, you would drink all of these ingredients for a health benefit. We’ve combined them for a delightful flavour, but there are also the positive health implications too. 

We’re taking something broadly cherished and then asking how we can think outside the box using our herbal encyclopaedia. 

C&C: It’s a real point of difference! Another point of difference is the variation in the types of products that you create. For our readers who might not know, would you mind explaining the difference between something like a Sparkling Probiotic Water and a standard Kombucha?

Mason: Our Sparkling Probiotic Water is a water kefir. A water kefir is a ferment similar to kombucha in that it’s a beverage made through fermentation, but the actual culture base used for the fermentation is completely different. So, in a kombucha you will have a vinegar bacterium and then you’ll get yeasts that are commonly found in cider and beer. You’ve got a bacteria and yeast mix there.

With water kefir, you have a far more bacteria dominant fermentation which is largely lactobacillus. There’s a very different culture set in both. Lactobacillus is commonly associated with probiotic benefits. If you were really honing in on the gut health benefit, water kefir is your better option. Water kefir and kombucha taste vastly different. As it ferments, a kombucha is going to taste like sour fruit - like sour apricots and peaches - which is highly dependent on the tea used. Whereas with water kefir, you’re going to get a very dry and vanilla creamy flavour. For example, if you were to put a raspberry into the kombucha, you’re going to get a sour tart raspberry.

If you were to put a raspberry into a water kefir, you’re going to get a creaming soda raspberry. They’re really different in terms of where they end up as flavour. People who like water kefir simply might not like kombucha and vice versa. The benefits of one or the other are also different. In water kefir, you expect to see a slightly higher sugar content because the fermentation doesn’t go as sour and dry as a kombucha.

But you’ll get far more probiotic benefits from a water kefir. Water kefir is also a lighter drink and is more like a spritz or flavoured soda water, whereas a kombucha has quite a bit of body to it, in the same way that a beer or cider might.

C&C: Fascinating! One of the great things about Kommunity Brew is your use of recyclable packaging. Have you found this to be a more sustainable and effective way of packaging the products overtime? 

Mason: We do an assessment every year to see which areas of our packaging can be addressed. There’s a few basic principles that we follow. The first is prioritising Australian made materials, so we always use Australian made glass because it has a high recyclable content. The standard glass that you get in Australia will have over fifty five percent of its materials coming from pre-used glass - Australia is a very sustainable source of glass. 

Secondly, we make sure that our label is sustainable and Australian made within 25km of the brewery. We work with our label supplier to find out how we can reduce the amount of plastic in the label. Your readers will see over the next twelve months that we’ve removed even more plastic from the label on our most recent print run. The most sustainable thing that we do at the brewery day-to-day outside of those big decisions would be that we run a solar-powered brewery. Seventy percent of our energy needs come from solar power. We also use heat pumps for our heating of water - you can imagine that a brewery that brews tea and kombucha uses a lot of hot water. We think that our biggest environmental impact is in how we actually run our production plant, which is done all by ourselves. We are the brewers behind the product. 

When we built our brewery two years ago, it was a derelict, abandoned building in our neighbourhood. It was a bit of an eyesore with lots of graffiti and we rebuilt it with over seventy percent recycled materials as well - secondhand refrigerator panels, balustrades, even our epoxy floor and the paint. We stopped something like a hundred litres of epoxy paint from going to landfill. When we reconstructed the brewery, we utilised salvage yards and secondhand suppliers to minimise the amount of new materials we were using. The only new fixtures in our building are electrical engines because a lot of it doesn’t need to be new material! 

C&C:  That’s amazing. So how has the process of getting these products ‘on the shelf’ been over time and how did you grow from your initial ‘lemonade stand’ approach? 

Mason: For the first four years, we were over here in Perth in farmers markets, doing everything ourselves. We still run our own distribution here in Perth, it’s our own trucks and drivers going out and delivering to three hundred stores here in Perth. It’s our own account managers and everything is done by our staff here in Perth. We didn’t expand over east until we met Hayssam and went with Cartel & Co about two years ago. We’ve tried to achieve that same sort of experience, so we like to meet customers first. We went out to meet them, introduced ourselves and told them that we work with Hayssam to manage our customers. We grew by meeting the customer, providing them with our story and trying to understand what their needs were to work out something that is win-win. It’s really quite ‘basic’ and is not a complex strategy. We meet customers, introduce ourselves, understand their needs and then try to meet those needs. It’s relational - we have a lot of data at our disposal and that’s not to say that we don’t make decisions from an analytical perspective as well, but we do try to put relationships first, establish them and then use data to benefit the relationship. 

C&C: In that process of expanding the business, why did you choose to work with Cartel & Co? What were you looking for in a distributor? 

Mason: Because of our grassroots beginning, it’s very important for us to work from the bottom up. We started in the independent market and are now working our way up. We wanted to work with a distributor who has a really high exposure to family-run businesses and small business, because these are our bread and butter customers - Jarred and I met and started our business together by running one of these locations. Our National Sales Manager Sam was also our rep at that particular store. 

We paired with Hayssam because he was growth-minded and progressive. He had products that would be the products for the next 18-24 months and he is highly exposed to those cottage-sized, family-level businesses which are our target market. He takes a front seat in a lot of these relationships and a lot of his customers know him directly and work with him. This is very similar to the way that we operate, so I think culturally we’re very similar.

C&C: Before we sign off, if I was brand new to Kommunity Brew, which product of yours would you recommend that I try first?

Mason: I would highly recommend trying the Hibiscus Rose Sparkling Probiotic Water. It’s delicious like Turkish Delight and is so yum. For a fermented beverage, it’s quite light in its ‘funkiness’. You expect fermentations like sauerkraut, kimchi and kombucha to have a high degree of complexity and the Hibiscus Rose Sparkling Probiotic Water is really approachable. 

After this, you’d go down the rabbit hole of kombuchas with their intensity. I think kombucha tastes amazing, but it is a level up in its intensity.

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