Another brewery tap room will open in Wichita this weekend
Wichita is getting another brewery taproom — a taproom that doesn’t serve beer.
Instead, it serves kombucha, a carbonated, fermented tea that is full of probiotics and antioxidants and is believed to improve gut health, and it’s owned by one of Wichita’s best-known, longest-running brewers: Inspirit Kombucha Brewing Co.
The business, owned and run by Tara McCreary and her husband, Mark, has been around since 2015 and became a Kansas Grown Farmer’s Market favorite starting in 2017. Now, the business has grown to the point that the McCrearys supply kombucha to 19 different businesses in and around Wichita, including Beautiful Day Cafe, Songbird Juice Co., Flavors Coffee and Ice Cream Bar and more.
Now, the couple is opening a tasting room inside its brewing facility at 3435 N. Emporia, where they moved their operations a little more than a year ago.
The tap room’s grand opening will be from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday. After that, it’ll be open from 3:30 to 6:30 p.m. on Wednesdays and from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturdays.
The room has three tables that seat about 12 people, said Mark McCreary, and he hopes they will be filled by the customers he doesn’t get to see when farmer’s market season ends.
“We have a real strong farmer’s market following, and in the winter, they kind of like to see us still,” he said. “I’ve become friends with a lot of these folks over the years, and this just gives them the opportunity to come hang out.”
The tap room features custom-made tap handles made from a mulberry tree that used to be on the McCrearys’ property. They’ll always have eight of their nine kombucha flavors — like cranberry orange, mango ginger and pineapple cherry — on tap.
Eventually, Mark McCreary said, he’d like to turn an area outside the brewery into a place where food trucks could set up. There are lots of people working in the area at places like Pratt Industries, Coleman and Johnson Controls that would like such a perk, he said.
The McCrearys became interested in kombucha and its health benefits after their second son, Samuel, was born in 2014. When he was around 1, he started having severe digestive distress, and kombucha helped, Mark said.
Inspirit’s new tap room is Wichita’s second like it. Back in September, the Apollo Fermentations tap room opened at 1631 S. Hillside.
This story was originally published January 7, 2020 at 9:32 AM.
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