By Sharon Flynn
I founded this business over 10 years ago now - firstly with another woman whom I'd just met, which turned into another iteration with some other mums, and then again to join with a couple who owned a winery - and from there to a new partner - and then finally by 2020, to where it is now and how it all began really - with me.
My own fermentation fervour began with sour dough... when I realised that making bread with a packet of yeast was not actually 'from scratch'! Who was the 'yeast farmer'? How did they make yeast? Was this another packet mix? I went to the baker and bought moist 'caked yeast' from them and was very satisfied for a few weeks, even felt professional for a while.
But then I began to wonder - where did that came from? A little more research led me to sour dough - I ordered Sandor Katz's book 'Wild Fermentation'.....and then my bacterial spiritual awakening occurred... my bacterial epiphany... yeast was just sitting there, in the flour? It expanded my dough so mysteriously and magically - and it was one of those moments where you so wonderfully - that there is so much more to the world than you'd thought. Soon the sour dough grew into other projects....my laundry became a place of sour dough mothers, pickles, and experi-fermentations. Friends would come to my kitchen—crocks groaning with different pickles and jars bubbling with alien-looking things inside—often leaving a new project or jar of something or at least a bit curious about 'making things from scratch'.
My mum is Dutch - so happily I do have some blood connection to sauerkraut, although we were much more into salted liquorice, croquets and fries with mayo than kraut, to be honest. I did end up with a pretty cool handed down kraut recipe though.
In my early 20's, after working a season at a ski resort in Gunma, Japan, and a year as a nanny in Ikebukuro, Tokyo, I moved to the base of Mt. Takao for a job. And like any person who moves a lot - (army-brats for one..), I found myself in a town - in fact, in a country where I knew almost no one. Luckily, before long and after some stalking, I grew a sort of friendship with the old ladies who had their garden down from where I lived. We hung out for snippets of time here and there - and they she showed me not just how to garden, but how to preserve a harvest. I learned to make my own tsukemono, pickles in a miso bed, made mochi at the temple in the winter, and joined a food club and where I learnt to make miso, nattō, and all manner of Japanese home cooking.
I stayed for many years there - fell in love and married him in Tokyo, and came home in time to have my first baby. As my family grew, due to my husband’s work, we moved and had to set up homes wherever that took us - Sydney, Tokyo, Chicago, Seattle and Brussels. Being a stay at home mum was a luxury - but at times that is lonely too and so I leaned on my passion - to cook -and find out where the best, local food was and try to be a part of or at least learn some of their food traditions. In Chicago my girls were given dill pickles straight from the barrel while sitting in a trolley in the local supermarket. So we made pickles. And cheese. In Seattle, I went through a cheese and yoghurt making phase – using packet cultures – until my sour dough bread epiphany happened. We joined a beautiful well organised CSA - Jubliee Farms - the most beautiful memory of land and farming I have still - (please check them out and learn from them here.) They held all kinds of get togethers around harvest, including pickling and fermenting. There was so much excess at the end of summer we HAD to preserve it. But it wasn't until a few years later that knowledge came to mean something more than a passion and a thing to do with my time.
When we were living in Brussels, my youngest was four, she suddenly got pretty sick. It went on for months and months, beginning with a virus and then it grew into something nobody could diagnose. Her fevers ran high every 12 hours, she regressed and lost a scary amount of weight and was unable to keep food down. She missed months of school. Someone suggested that all the antibiotics had left her devoid of essential, good gut bacteria - and I soon learnt that these were readily available in food. Fermented food.
I saw a clear and direct line through all of my hobbies and realised they all came under the umbrella of fermenting (!) - and the foods that could help her replace her gut bacteria were on that very list.
Out came the miso soup and natto, yoghurt and pickles.
We moved back to Australia and not long after (for all kinds of reasons of course) I found myself solo parenting with three daughters. It wasn't a particularly easy time. I had never worked in a paying job and been a mum, let alone do that solo. We hadn't lived in Australia for over 12 years. I took a job 3 days a week at the girl’s school and met a mum who showed and shared her milk kefir and water kefir grains with me. Prior to that I'd only bought milk kefir from the store - kefir, and SCOBY ferments were a new magic to me and I was once again in awe of the microbial world; invisible but always present, and such an essential, missing food.
Milk and water kefir seemed to really help. She had gone from craving simple carbohydrates to waking up wanting sour foods - her special drink - more food - second helpings and keeping it all down. Her appetite and energy, and her little spirit in fact, all came back. I became impassioned, evangelical - and had to tell everyone. New friends would come to my home and see my kitchen full of crocks and bubbling jars.... usually leaving with a bottle or jar and possibly a bit sick of hearing about living foods....but - some of them started craving it and a few of them wanted to pay for it. So, I made it for them. Before long I felt like I was living my own version of Weeds or Breaking Bad only with lacto-ferments. My kitchen was the lab!
The Fermentary sprang from this accidentally on purpose… I knew nothing about business and was scared to commit to any debt - nor could I obtain any funding as a single mum. But word of these ferments spread within months of hitting the fridges of our little Woodend health food store – I had been putting it in their fridge for them to sell in return for credits for organic food. Pretty soon, food luminaries like Alla Wolf-Tasker of The Lake House Daylesford and Andrew McConnell and even a Sydney cafe started ordering. Meanwhile, I was still working from my home kitchen…and working at the school.
I thought of bakeries, butchers, green grocers.. fish and cheese mongers... where were the Fermentaries? I wanted to be that. A local fermentary.
About a year into The Fermentary, big orders started to come in from stores all over. I was renting a spot on a winery, grating cabbage with a wooden grater, stomping it with a large wooden stomper, and fermenting in Polish ceramic crocks. And then hand jarring over long nights and days, listening to podcasts! I had to move to grow, and after several moves and a couple of short lived 'business partners' I found myself in an old abattoir - growing life in a place that had recently been doing quite the opposite.
In 2015 our Milk Kefir was awarded Best New Product at the Delicious. Magazine Awards, and I went to Tennessee to stay with Sandor Katz for a 'Residential'. In 2016 we got a gold medal for our kraut and I went back to Japan - to Kyoto for a week residential on growing Koji. In 2017 we were awarded another Gold for our water kefir and also - Outstanding Artisan by Delicous. In May 2017 my first book "Ferment for Good - Ancient Food for the Modern Gut" was released and reprinted after only 4 months. A bestseller! It's now in it's 3rd print and available in Italian too. My 2nd book Wild Drinks came out in Jan 2023.
The business has grown - in 2021, craving face-to-face connection with customers, friends and students as the world was slowly opening up following the pandemic, I opened a brick and mortar shop in Fitzroy North. My daugheters worked there with me and we had the best times - a space to run workshops and pack mail orders...maybe some retail. But the shop sort of took on a life of its own - not only a space to teach, but to create, host other fermenters, speakers, authors and passionate story tellers. Relationships with our customers became the most beautiful creation of all. We even had my own, second book launch there too.
In December 2024, the lease ended, and we decided to close the brick and mortar shop and create other ways to connect with people - perhaps a bit further afield. It was a bit of a sad thing to do - but after 3 years in a shop front - the simplicity of going back to a home office and dabbling in a smaller kitchen - and keeping that larger factory pumping is what I needed.
I have been inspired and engaged with many amazing people - but also been exposed to the less lovely side of people. It's taken me a full decade to learn that my passion and the hard and less enchaning aspects of business need to coexist. This move is about finding that equilibrium. We might find another shop somewhere along the way - but until then... it's the websites turn to get some love.
And yes - The Fermentary is growing again -we have great distributors in most states. I think I have nutted out how to sustain this passion and share these wonderful, life giving foods with as many people as makes sense, and to keep business a human affair. That's probably the hardest thing because competing with larger corporations and dealing with ridiculous government regulations certainly do not make that easy.
Hey it's worth it though. Someone's gotta make the ferments! And we are here for that - for a cultured gut. x
