Apiary was born from a love of beautiful ingredients and a vision to make drinking healthier.

In 2015, we met at a small Maker's Market event for local food and beverage creators. Rachna had decorated the venue with foraged flowers, and Nole was serving his home-brewed hard honey kombucha. We hit it off right away, connecting over our shared passion for creating nourishing food and drink from exceptional ingredients grown by friends and local farms.

Together, our culinary experiments and curiosity grew. In our tiny home kitchens, we cooked, made fermented foods, and brewed our own beverages, both probiotic and alcoholic.

Our excitement for creating nourishing food and drink was rooted in our shared values, which would also become the foundational values of Apiary: we connect to nature through good food and drink, and if you start with the best quality ingredients, the end result is more delicious and better for you too.

At the time, the only alcoholic beverages we could find at stores were so processed and industrialized that they had little reference or resemblance to their ingredients or nutritional value.

So we decided to create our own beverage company that would transform the most nourishing ingredients in nature into beverages that are both better for us and the environment and invite folks to think a little more deeply about where their drinks come from.

Apiary officially started in the summer of 2015. A small warehouse space in Carpinteria would become our experimental brewing space and tiny taproom. We wanted to start as small as possible to experiment, learn, and explore the possibilities in this new paradigm of brewing healthier alcohol. It was small enough that the two of us could do every job in the bar and brewery, and it was conveniently located next to BrewLab, a like-minded nanobrewery pushing the boundaries of beer creativity.