If you haven’t caught on yet, the team at Antifragile Brewing in State College has become quite the success in the PA beer landscape. The brewery, who regularly sells out of all canned beer, opened a little over a year ago and has quickly become a must visit destination. Even being ranked as one of the ten best breweries in the first half of 2023.
Along with their amazing lineup of beer, the brewery has also provided the local market with a fantastic lineup of Kombucha through their brand “Moody Culture Kombucha.” You can read more about the backstory of both brands here.
As the story goes Moody Culture started in 2017 out of a basement apartment where they began distributing raw kombucha locally to a variety of different cafes and natural markets. The company grew to serve the Pittsburgh and Harrisburg markets, and at one point until Covid began, Terrain restaurants in the Philly area.
As a huge fan of craft beer, co-founder John Schaffer always had the desire to create a beer brewery, which led to the creation of Antifragile Brewing. The start of the brewery allowed Schaffer and his team to continue to produce the non alcoholic Kombucha and pair it along with adult friendly drinks in the beer that was being served. The focus was initially on maintaining the kombucha in NA form while developing the beer brand and fine tuning taproom and production operations.
Antifragile’s Head Brewer, Paulo Nami, who is a Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) judge, was judging a beer competition and met another BJCP member, Katie Legenski. Katie (who is a chemical engineer by trade) was involved in homebrewing and had always wanted to move into commercial brewing. It was at that time that Paulo brought Katie to the Antifragile to run the kombucha program, and improve the NA process for more efficiency.
With a bit of trial, error, and experimentation, Katie was able to develop a 5.5% ABV Kombucha that the entire team was thrilled with. The first Moody Culture Hard Kombucha was released in May of 2023 just a year after opening Antifragile and Moody Culture hard cans were launched on August 18th.
Rather than blending hard seltzer with kombucha like many of the large brands, Moody Culture Hard is kombucha through and through by starting with the same Moody Culture base and then adding higher alcohol producing yeast during the fermentation process.
To enjoy both beer and kombucha from these brands we highly recommend visiting them 324 E Calder Way in State College. And follow Antifragile Brewing on Instagram and Facebook for all the latest beers and news.
