Sacred Springs Kombucha

Sacred Springs began as a kombucha brand and spent several years selling into the Grand Rapids market before Joel Andrus and Geoff Lamden opened a taproom of their own at 1059 Wealthy Street SE in early December 2018. The pair had wanted a bricks-and-mortar site from the beginning — "We have always wanted the taproom," Andrus told Grand Rapids Magazine at the opening. "We believe that we can reach the community with a brick and mortar." The room is deliberately small, a micro-taproom rather than a brewery hall, and sits on the Wealthy Street stretch in East Hills within a few minutes' walk of Chartreuse Sisters and Buffalo Traders Lounge. Twelve taps rotate through the house range, with bottles and howlettes sold to go, and the food offer is short and complementary rather than a full kitchen: bagel sandwiches supplied by Grand Rapids Bagel.

The brewing is where the interest lies, because the flavours are built as compositions rather than as fruit sodas. Root of Life is made with beets, ginger and turmeric; Flower of Life with jasmine, elderberries and hibiscus; Thursday Knight is a chamomile lavender; Trop Hopics puts pineapple with hops, borrowing the aromatic trick that makes an IPA read as fruit-forward; and The Grapeful Harvest is built on concord grape, which in Michigan is a local ingredient rather than an imported one. Kombucha is tart, tannic and lightly effervescent, which makes it one of the more convincing substitutes for a dry sparkling wine or a sour beer, and a flight across twelve taps is a genuine tasting exercise. One important qualification, and the reason this venue is rated a three rather than a five: Sacred Springs serves hard kombucha and mead alongside the standard range, so a guest who is avoiding alcohol needs to order deliberately rather than assume the whole board is safe. This is worth stating plainly because the venue reads, at a glance, like a fully alcohol-free room — it is a kombucha taproom, the branding is wellness-adjacent, and most of the twelve taps are non-alcoholic. But hard kombucha typically runs between four and seven percent ABV and is poured from the same style of tap into the same style of glass, which makes it one of the easier things in this guide to be handed by mistake. Ask which taps are the standard range before ordering, and be specific if someone else is buying.

With that caveat understood, the taproom is a genuinely useful room. Standard kombucha carries trace alcohol from fermentation, in the same range as a ripe banana or a sourdough loaf and well under the 0.5 percent threshold that defines a non-alcoholic drink in the United States, so it sits comfortably within what most people avoiding alcohol will drink. The tartness is the point: it gives a glass the acid backbone that fruit juice lacks and soda cannot fake, which is why it works where a sweet mocktail does not. The taproom opens Wednesday through Sunday, noon to 7pm, closed Monday and Tuesday, and sits within a short walk of Chartreuse Sisters, The Winchester and Buffalo Traders Lounge on the same Wealthy Street corridor.