Cultured South Fermentation Co.

Melanie Wade started selling Golda Kombucha in 2013 and spent five years working towards a room where people could drink it on draught. Cultured South opened on 20 May 2018 at 1038 White Street SW, a 1,200-square-foot unit in the Lee + White adaptive-reuse development in Atlanta's historic West End, on the BeltLine's Westside Trail. Atlanta Magazine covered the opening that April, reporting Wade's plan to start with six Golda flavours on tap — lavender lemon, peach ginger, strawberry mint, elderberry thyme, hibiscus blood orange and blackberry basil — and expand to ten lines rotating roughly twenty flavours. It was the first kombucha taproom in Georgia. Cultured South operates as the parent company for the fermentation side of the business and is the adopted home of Pure Abundance, the artisan vegan cheese line handmade and sold on site.

What you can drink there now spans the fermented spectrum: kombucha by the pint, flight, taste and growler, gelato floats built on it, water kefir, and jun — a lighter tea ferment made with honey instead of cane sugar. Apple Ginger Spice and a CBD Bluegrass kombucha are among the flavours the company currently promotes. Banjo cold brew coffee is on tap too, and the retail side sells local preserves, Doux South pickles, sourdough crackers and the Pure Abundance cheeses. The honest caveat, and the reason this is a four rather than a five: Cultured South is not an alcohol-free venue. It also brews Grandmother Hard Kombucha and mixes kombucha cocktails, and the hard and soft lines are poured from the same bar. Anyone avoiding alcohol should order by name and confirm, exactly as they would in a brewery taproom. With that said, the overwhelming majority of what is on offer is non-alcoholic, the room trades 11am to 7pm Tuesday through Sunday, and it is one of very few places on the Westside Trail where the default pour contains nothing.