ABOVE: Shoen Holdfast Farm Owner Shawn Shoen describes his set-up and process for creating kombucha. Using his current method, he can make around 180 16 oz bottles.

TRUMAN – Over the past year, Martin County beef farmer Shawn Shoen has worked on a perhaps outside-the-box pursuit that has found success.

It started in May of 2025, through a beef delivery Shoen made as the owner of Shoen Holdfast Farm.

“A friend of mine had ordered a half of beef,” he said. “We were delivering the half of beef to them, and they had told me, ‘Well, we’ll get you supper when you get here.’ When I got there, there was supper, and then sitting at the table to drink is this bottle of kombucha.”

While a little bit skeptical, Shoen tried some and found it to be super tasty. So much so that he wanted to get himself into the practice right away.

“Even before I left the house that day, I said, ‘I want you to tell me how to do this so that I can make it,'” Shoen said.

This wouldn’t be his first pursuit into brewing something, as he had tried to make hard ciders very briefly in the past. Shoen said some of his previously-learned skills even transferred over to this new venture.

“The processing of cleaning the bottles, the sanitization and making sure that everything’s clean,” he said. “You can get that from a dairy background as well.”

To make the kombucha, Shoen said he uses black tea, sugar, and the special ingredient that makes the whole process go.

“SCOBY is a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast,” he said. “It’s like making sourdough. It’s that same principle that you have a piece you take from the old and put it in to make the new. The SCOBY is the same thing, that it’s a living organism, if you will.”

After letting the black tea, sugar and SCOBY sit for 10 days, the solids inside are strained and removed from the liquid. The kombucha is then back-sweetened with whatever flavorings Shoen chooses. His most popular flavor is blueberry-pomegranate, but he has also sold pineapple, cherry, strawberry-banana, ginger turmeric and cranberry.

While kombucha and beef seem like totally separate pursuits, Shoen said one has also helped him with the other.

“It gave me something to take to the farmers market to be able to have people come over to me and ‘Hey, try a sample of this,'” he said. “While they’re sampling the kombucha, then I can talk to them about the beef, because I can’t bring beef to the farmers market.”

It wasn’t all smooth sailing, though. Shoen said there’s a level of care that has to be taken when making kombucha, or it can get messy.

“If it’s in the secondary fermentation process [and] you don’t catch them fast enough, there’s a sweet spot,” he said. “Pineapple. I really struggled with pineapple in the beginning, because every bottle was a bottle bomb. I couldn’t open them, because as soon as you opened it, it exploded out and was done.”

It’s also a process that depends on the season. Shoen places the bottles into coolers to prevent unprotected spillage when bottles do burst, but in the winter, he needs to use a heating mat underneath the kombucha.

“One of the struggles I got when winter came is my house isn’t warm enough for the kombucha to be at a happy temperature,” Shoen said. “They sit at about 72 degrees, which is the happy spot.”

Overall, the response has been really good, according to Shoen. One thing he has seen and responded to is pricing. He uses specialized kombucha bottles, which cost $3.20 each, and if the bottle is not returned, he has to buy new ones. As such, he devised a system to reduce this.

“Currently, I’m selling them for $7 for a 16-ounce bottle,” Shoen said. “When you bring that bottle back, then the next one that you get is only $4.”

With a little under a year under his belt, Shoen said he feels pretty comfortable with the process and where everything is going.

“The simple answer is I’ll keep doing it as long as I’m enjoying doing it,” he said. “When it becomes too much of a pain, too much of a hassle, then I would be done. I like the stuff myself, and I want to share it with other people.”

For more information or inquiries, call (507) 230-1312.