Minors' Menace youth root beer brewing club, sponsored by Dave Chandler of the Grant County Youth Business Initiative and led by Rita J Herbst of the Nuevos Comienzos Community Kitchen, traveled to the south valley of Albuquerque to attend the first annual New Mexico Fermentation Festival. This celebration of all things fermented took place at the historic Gutierrez Hubble House on Saturday June 25th. Many vendors were represented including the Barrio Brinery, The Old Windmill Dairy, and The Kombucha Project. Minors' Menace proposed and was accepted as a lecturer along with an impressive lineup of experts and entrepreneurs. We gave an interactive presentation to a packed house about the history of the club, presented by Ava Bjornstad. The collaboration began on February 9, 2016, with a mission to create a business centered on a traditional, delicious and relatively healthy root beer. We first tested commercially available root beers and discovered that they do not all taste the same. Nor are they fermented or brewed; they are only carbonated water with added root beer flavoring. Our initial brews were unsuccessful due to failures and faults with using yeast to carbonate our beverage. Sharon Bookwalter introduced our group to a probiotic water kefir fermentation method as an alternative, which gave our root beer a marketing and health benefit/advantage. Kenya Leahy presented on the brewing process.

Our next step was to perfect our flavor. Tasting each of the herbs and roots separately, both as a hot and cold brew, enables us to identify desirable or not so desirable flavors in the finished mix. Josephine Khera explained this and distributed samples to the audience. Xavier Khera and Rainier Fischer collaborated to give an overview of our market strategy and a previously conducted market survey. For the survey, each member had created their own brew to be sampled and surveyed by passersby at the local Market caf+