Emily Lin has something of an uphill battle convincing people to try her company’s signature product: a fermented drink known as water kefir. It doesn’t have the name recognition of kombucha (nor a cute nickname like booch), and she’s found that hawking a “fermented drink” doesn’t exactly reel customers in.

So she’s learning to massage her pitch. “Maybe it’s like tricking your kid into eating zucchini bread,” she says. At the first public tasting of her company, Jem Ferments, last weekend, she tried a few different approaches for various samplers.

“I started out introducing it as water kefir, I introduced it as a sparkling probiotic drink, I introduced it as a stronger-flavored sparkling water,” Lin says of last weekend’s tastings at Union Kitchen Grocery, where the drinks are now on shelves. “Most people latched when I described it more [as a] sparkling water. … When I’d start off with ‘fermented drink,’ I got an ‘ugh’ vibe.”

Her “sparkling probiotic drink,” as the cans declare themselves, is indeed fermented, but doesn’t have quite the vinegar-y taste of kombucha, nor the funk of kimchi or sauerkraut. Its tartness is muted, similar to yogurt. The sweetness comes from whole fruits: At Union Kitchen, Lin stocks a strawberry lime flavor, an orange ginger variety, and a black cherry lemon drink. People have told Lin it tastes to them like an grown-up version of a Capri Sun.

Lin’s journey to ferment her own sodas started when she moved to D.C. permanently in the fall of 2018, and needed a hobby. She always liked baking and cooking, but “I wanted to do something more interesting, I guess,” and settled on getting really into fermentation. She documented her experiments with kimchi, pickled mustard greens, and milk kefir on her blog, also called Jem Ferments, starting in March 2019. It kept her occupied when she wasn’t at her day job as a software engineer.

“By day, I code and by night, I ferment,” she says.

She and her sister Jessica, who runs the company with her, were accepted into Union Kitchen’s Accelerator Program, which offers free kitchen access during a three-month business, food-handling, and marketing bootcamp for burgeoning businesses.

The process of making water kefir begin with a starter called with kefir grains—clumps of bacteria and yeast—that ferments in water and sugar (those grains are the kefir version of kombucha’s better known and more adorable-sounding SCOBY). Lin loads the concoctions up with fruits and lets them steep before straining, carbonating, and canning. Unlike kombucha, which can take close to a week, water kefir finishes fermenting in just a day or two. For now, she’s doing all the kitchen work herself (sometimes with the help of her boyfriend) out of Union Kitchen in Ivy City. “The nice thing about a shared kitchen is there’s a lot of big strong people who notice me struggling to move a keg from one side of the table to the other,” Lin says.

Lin first encountered water kefir last year on a trip to Malaysia with her sister. But the exact provenance of the fermented drink is difficult to pinpoint: In Mexico the kefir grains are known as tibicos, and found naturally occurring on the prickly pear cactus. Other origin stories trace strains of the bacteria back to Tibet or Eastern Europe. Nowadays, big kombucha brands including GT and Kevita are trying their hand at selling it on a national scale. (Kevita, by the way, is also calling it a “sparkling probiotic drink;” GT dubs it with the more musical-sounding moniker “aqua kefir.”) A similar, more yogurt-y kefir product made with lactose, kefir milk, is more popular, and available at stores like Trader Joe’s.

Like other fermented foods, kefir water has its own enthusiasts who tout its supposed health benefits. “Probiotics are really good for your gut health, it’s great for your skin,” Lin says. “If you have digestive problems I think it’s really helpful for that.” Proving the existence of actual health benefits of probiotics is tricky, because there are so many different strains of the bacteria found in foods like kimchi, sauerkraut, yogurt, and water kefir.

Lin and Jem Ferments are entering a local market awash in non-alcoholic drinks: There’s sodas, switchels, shrubs, and yes, kombuchas. She’s just hoping she can convince buyers at Union Kitchen Groceries, where cans retail for $3.99 each, to break their La Croix habit.

“I want to introduce people to something that’s tasty and natural,” she says. “And I don’t want them to be scared.”

Jem Ferments is available at Union Kitchen Grocery locations. Lin will offer samples at the 9th Street NW location on Sunday from 12 p.m.-2 p.m.