Over the Moon

As we speak, Ayla Bystrom-Williams and her life partner/business partner/brewmaster James Hill are finally able to open outdoor seating at their popular Honeymoon Brewery (907 W Alameda St., Unit B, (505) 303-3139) and taproom in the New Solana Center. After years of toiling, experimenting, brewing, business-ing and parenting, it feels like the enterprise is at long last on the cusp of getting the proper recognition. It’s not like Honeymoon has been unpopular; more like the world is finally catching up.

Bystrom-Williams is as puro Santa Fe as it gets, a community-minded businesswoman and mother who, like so many locals before her, had to leave town to truly understand its appeal. After wrapping high school at Santa Fe Prep, Bystrom-Williams headed east to attend Connecticut College with a full scholarship and her heart set on becoming a documentarian. After school, a family emergency pulled her to Seattle, where a job slicing meat for a co-op deli helped introduce her to kombucha.

“My boss said ‘You should try this stuff,’ and all I know is that I can carry a lot of stress in my stomach, but when I was drinking kombucha, I would have these intensely euphoric moments of relief,” she tells SFR. “In kombucha there are trace elements of caffeine and B vitamins, and those tend to make you feel more energized.”

The other half of the “we” is Hill, whom Bystrom-Williams started dating in 2013 shortly after she returned home to Santa Fe. Together, they realized that while the kombucha we know from Whole Foods and health food stores has become ubiquitous, nobody, she says, was brewing up a quality alcoholic version as far as she and Hill could tell.

“James was super,” she notes. “He’s got a good brain for brewing, he can dial it in, and he was excited for a challenge.”

By 2014, Bystrom-Williams and Hill would take part in Los Alamos National Labs’ New Mexico Small Business Technical Assistance Program. That ran until 2019 and overlapped with the SFid business accelerator program (an offshoot of Albuquerque’s ABQid accelerator which ran in Santa Fe for just one year), as did the Miller Lite Tap The Future Business Plan Competition, through which Hill and Bystrom-Williams won $200,000. Meanwhile, Hill was going through what Bystrom-Wiliams calls “a whole lot of trial and error,” in the brewing process.

“Originally, what we thought we were going to make was a lot more like beer,” she explains, “but then something in James’ research brought us to this a-ha moment with the kombucha. I’ll say it’s kind of ridiculous we even thought we were going to make something good at first, but when you’re young and don’t have children yet, brewing things is fun.”

Besides, she says, they knew they were onto something when some of the biggest names in booze sampled the product after the Miller Lite contest win.

“We got to go up to Peter Coors’ office and give him and Coors CEO John Gavin a taste,” she says. “Seeing their genuine interest, we thought there was probably a lot of money to be made in this, but their validation for the product...”

She trails off, instead describing her and Hill’s spartan youths before waxing philosophical on Honeymoon’s market fit. The taproom opened in 2018, and Bystrom-Williams says that if it hadn’t been for Paper Dosa owner Nellie Tischler pre-ordering thousands of dollars worth of product for her restaurant, the business model embraced by Honeymoon might look very different—as in a taproom only instead of a popular package element.

It’s also a unique product, no question, though there are more hard kombucha companies popping up daily, Bystrom-Williams says—like the hard seltzer rush of a couple years back, only with so much more room to create a subpar product. Fizzy booze is fizzy booze, whereas kombucha is the product of SCOBY (that’s symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast, btw), a living thing which creates what one might call a sour/pungent flavor. In other words, there’s lots of room for error, but Honeymoon’s use of champagne vats and a process similar to that of Belgian beers (think fruity, almost) makes for something else entirely. They’ve created numerous varieties since opening in 2018, and if one must liken Honeymoon’s stuff to beer, they can (though it’s gluten-free), but it’s really it’s own thing—tart and weirdly refreshing at 5.5% ABV, plus with those gut benefits Bystrom-Williams discovered in Seattle years ago. That’s at least part of why you’ll find Honeymoon products in Santa Fe and Albuquerque Whole Foods locations.

In-person sales at the taproom remain a big part of the plan, and Honeymoon now boasts a pleasant outdoor seating area in the Solana Center parking lot that was built after the city opened up special permits to local establishments struggling with lower numbers during the pandemic. Honeymoon has also reopened nights from 5-10 pm, Friday-Sunday, though with winter looming and a possible cutoff date of Oct. 31 for outdoor permitting, things could change. Bystrom-Williams doesn’t know what’ll happen next, but says the taproom will require proof of vaccination or a recent negative test from guests who wish to sit indoors—a trend we’re likely to see more of as the Delta variant spreads.

“I will not run this place based on profit alone,” Bystrom-Williams says. “I’m not going to let everybody pack in here dangerously, that’s not going to happen.”

Still, with canned cocktails from Silver City’s Little Toad Creek Brewery & Distillery and a plan to roll out more products alongside live music events when safe, Honeymoon is poised for a serious breakthrough.

“We’re not quite there yet, and I don’t know how it’s going to be long-term, but I’m tired of living in a world where it’s just privileged white men telling me the laws of business,” Bystrom-Williams says. “As much as we have to think about profit, that’s not how this started. It really started with trying to give somebody a drinking experience they haven’t had before.”