Legacy
THE DECISION
Why Old School Exists: One Instinct Toward the Best Kombucha in Kerala
Old School was not planned. It happened — the way most honest things do, quietly and without a roadmap. What began as a brew in a Wayanad kitchen became a question: what if kombucha carried Ayurvedic botanicals instead of fruit? Not as a gimmick. Not as a trend. But because Ayurveda already understood what fermentation was doing — transformation through patience, healing through process, balance through what is added and what is left out.
That instinct became the decision. While the rest of the category reached for mango, passion fruit, and berry — flavours borrowed from everywhere and rooted in nothing — Old School reached for Jatamansi, Sarsaparilla, Ramacham, Sarvasugandhi. Ingredients with centuries of documented wisdom behind them. Ingredients that belonged in a living, fermented drink. That distinction is what the best kombucha in Kerala is built on.
Constraint was selected as a foundation. Not reluctantly. Naturally. Because the Ayurvedic tradition had always understood that less interference produces more truth. Old School is the pursuit of that truth — in every batch, without exception, and in honest pursuit of the best kombucha in Kerala.
“We did not wait for the industry to make room. We brewed.”
- OLD SCHOOL KOMBUCHA
THE FOUNDER
DR. ANJANA S PHALGUNAN
Founder & Director, Old School Kombucha
I always knew I would follow the path of healing.
Not because it was expected — but because it was already in me. I come from a quiet lineage of Ayurvedic wisdom. The kind passed down not through textbooks, but through time, reverence, and memory. My grandfather and his mother before him were revered Ayurvedic vaidyars in Kannur. Healing was not a career choice in our family. It was an inheritance.
In 2017, I graduated from Trivandrum Ayurvedic College. And soon after, Wayanad welcomed me — with its rolling hills, mist laced mornings, and the scent of monsoon earth. I did not choose Wayanad the way you choose a city. It arrived around me, slowly, until it felt like the only place I had ever been. There, in a small village, I met Vipin — a chef, precise and instinctive, with a palate trained by years in professional kitchens. We crossed paths, then parted. He left for the West Indies.I stayed in Wayanad. Kerala held me the way it holds everything that belongs here.
And then the world changed.
The pandemic pulled everything inward. Kitchens closed. Jobs vanished. Plans dissolved. Vipin came home — not as a visitor, but for good. We got married, quietly, without ceremony or noise. Just clarity. Two people in Wayanad, in the middle of a world that had stopped, choosing to begin something together.
In the stillness that followed, we began looking for something to build. Something alive.
Vipin ordered a SCOBY. It arrived in a plastic pouch, pale and strange — something between science and spirit. I laughed. It looked like nothing I would ever trust. But I did.
Our first brew was far from perfect. Sharp, sour, unsettling. I did not like it. But my body did. Subtle changes, quiet harmonies. I felt things recalibrate. That was the beginning.
We read. We brewed. We failed. We refined.
As we brewed more, I saw it clearly — this ancient, living thing spoke the same language as Ayurveda. Gut health, balance, transformation through process rather than intervention. Vipin brought what I could not — the instinct of a trained chef, the ability to feel when something was close, when it needed more time, when it was ready. An Ayurvedic doctor and a chef. Between us, Old School had everything it needed.
Not a product. A practice. Not a trend. A return to something that had always been true. What we were making, slowly and without shortcuts, was becoming the most honest version of what the best kombucha in Kerala could be.
We did not wait for the industry to make room. We brewed.
THE SOURCE
Farmer-Led, Foundation First: The Root of the Best Kombucha in Kerala
The turning point came with tea.
Every botanical that enters an Old School batch — every root, rhizome, and leaf — comes from small-scale farmers, homemakers, and local cultivators whose relationship with the land is measured in generations, not targets. Most grow within Wayanad or close to it. Some do not — Jatamansi comes from Uttarakhand, Jeera from Gujarat — because certain ingredients only grow where they grow, and the best kombucha in Kerala does not compromise on what goes inside it simply for the sake of convenience.
Wayanad has no shortage of tea. Old School tried many. PK Kumaran’s farm — five acres on the Nilgiri border, natural farming, zero chemicals — is where the search stopped. The base became what it was always supposed to be. Clean, deep, and honest to its origin.
Flavour did not improve through adjustment. It improved through foundation. That is what pursuing the best kombucha in Kerala actually demands — knowing where everything comes from, and never settling until it is right.
THE DIRECTION
Not a Trend. A Commitment to the Best Kombucha in Kerala and Beyond.
Old School is not built for trend cycles.
The objective is singular — to establish a fermentation house defined by process, fixed standards, and an integrity that does not shift based on what the market is doing. Not a beverage brand chasing distribution. Not a wellness product riding a wave. A fermentation house. The distinction matters because one is built for the moment and the other is built for decades.
Growth will follow discipline, not the reverse. That has been true since the first batch and it will remain true at whatever scale follows. The best kombucha in Kerala is not a ceiling. It is a beginning — of something that intends to be felt far beyond the state, far beyond the category, and far beyond what the industry currently imagines small-batch fermentation from Wayanad is capable of.
Old School is patient. It has always been patient. That is the point.
THE SYMBOL
The Elephant: The Soul Behind the Best Kombucha in Kerala
The elephant is not a decoration.
In the jungles of Wayanad, elephants move through the hills the way they always have — unhurried, unapologetic, completely themselves. There is a wildness to them that no domestication touches. A character that belongs entirely to where they come from. Old School watches the same hills. Brews beneath the same canopy. And chose the elephant because it understood, instinctively, that the best kombucha in Kerala carries the same quality — untamed, unfiltered, impossible to replicate anywhere else.
Composure under strength. Grounded, deliberate, self-contained. An Ayurvedic doctor who trusted a living culture before she understood it. A chef who left professional kitchens to brew in a Wayanad home. Two people who chose depth over speed, process over convenience, and a harder path because it was the only honest one. The elephant sits the way they brew — with patience, with purpose, and without apology.
The blazer is a nod to craft and refinement. But the soul stays wild. Just like the kombucha.
THE FOUNDATION
Why Wayanad: Where the Best Kombucha in Kerala
Takes Root
Wayanad is one of the most agriculturally rich districts in India. Coffee, pepper, cardamom, ginger, turmeric — grown here not by corporations but by families. Small landholdings. Generational knowledge. A farming community that has quietly sustained one of the most biodiverse landscapes in the country without asking for recognition. It is also — quietly — where the best kombucha in Kerala begins, not in a brewery, but in the soil.
Old School did not arrive here to use that. It grew from it. The farmers, the cultivators, the homemakers who supply ingredients — they are not vendors. They are the reason every batch has the character it does. What this region carries — in its soil, its people, its agricultural memory — is more than enough to make a serious mark on the kombucha world. Not despite being from Wayanad. Because of it.
What Wayanad’s farming community offers is not just ingredients. It is knowledge — of soil, of season, of what grows where and why. That knowledge enters every batch. Every bottle of the best kombucha in Kerala grows from this ground. And no other ground produces it quite the same way.
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