Born from Big Island Booch Kombucha, The Booch Bar serves living food in the heart of Hilo — made with the freshest local, organic ingredients.
It started with one bottle. In 2013, Kela Cosgrave and Brendan Roberts set up a small table at Uncle Robert’s Awa Club night market in Kalapana and sold a single bottle of kombucha. They’d been brewing it at home for a simple reason: they’d felt what this raw, living tea did for them, and it seemed a little crazy to pay a fortune to ship it across an ocean when they could make it fresh themselves.
That one bottle turned into something they didn't expect. People kept coming back with stories — about their digestion, their energy, how they felt — and it changed everything. "We never saw dollar signs," Kela has said. "We saw the ability to help people, and that's been the motivating factor all this time." Brewing booch stopped being a side project and became a kind of responsibility.
Later that year they opened the Big Island Booch Elixir Bar on Kīlauea Avenue, pouring small-batch kombucha straight from the tap. It caught on fast — and customers kept asking for food. "We couldn't find many healthy places to eat," Kela said, "so we decided to just do it." In 2014 they moved into a bigger home in the heart of downtown Hilo, at 110 Keawe Street, opened the kitchen, and put a stage in the corner for live music. Living food, living music, living folks.
What began as a market table grew into one of Hawai'i's most-loved kombucha makers — booch and Jun on tap at spots across the islands, a brewery of their own, and, in 2017, recognition as the U.S. Small Business Administration's Small Business Persons of the Year for Hawai'i County. But the heart of it never moved. Same corner on Keawe Street. Still small-batch, still local and organic, still made with Aloha.
Today we're The Booch Bar. We brew our own kombucha (n/a and hard), Jun, and craft beer; we cook fresh, local, living food for omnivores, vegans and everyone in-between; and we keep the doors open as a gathering place for Hilo — for a good meal, a fresh pour, live music in the Rainbow Room, and good company. The same belief we started with, all those bottles ago: living food for living folks. To your health.