Fighting addiction by helping people find connection and acceptance in a safe environment.
As part of our SE spotlight series, CSED recently sat down with Jon Ruby, founder of Carlington Booch, to learn more about their recent move to a new larger space and location. Carlington Booch was originally profiled in November 2019.
Can you remind us about Carlington Booch and its mission?
Carlington Booch brews small-batch kombucha (or booch, as we call it) to help fight addiction in Ottawa. Our goal is to revitalize our community while fighting alongside the underdog. We do this by providing jobs and volunteer opportunities to people in recovery from addictions; sharing our stories and reducing the stigma around addiction and mental health; and presenting workshops on addiction and mental health.
Where’s your new location?
We’re now located at 81 Auriga Drive, units 3 and 4, which is in the Hunt Club Road and Prince of Wales Drive area of Nepean. We took possession of the space in February 2022.
What was the inspiration behind the move?
We had been looking for space for the last 1.5 years as our previous location was too small. The new space gives us the opportunity to bring all of our brands together and do a re-launch after COVID.
How are you using the space?
We now have a full kombucha brewery and tasting room as well as a multi use space – a class room, media room for content creation, large community work space and bookable office space.
How does the new location help further your mission?
Our new location allows us to have our own home base! On the commercial side of things we can scale our business from a farmers market sized production, all the way of to full distribution in Ontario and even nationally as we can get the opportunity to do so.
On our social initiative side we say the opposite of addiction is conection. Our space has greatly increased our capacity to conect. Our community can meet all in one space and new people can easily start to be a part of Carlington Booch and our weekly and monthly meetings our social brand holds called Ashes To Rubies. People as well can drop in and have a booch or a coffee in a safe alcohol free space and conect with each other throughout the week. We are open from 9am to 3pm as of now so come on in and let me barista for you!!!
We also have other community partnerships and connections that we are starting to host.
What’s next for Carlington Booch?
Our next steps as we continue to renovate the corners of our space is to finish up on our full time media room where we’ll be able to shoot our recovery content, hold our podcast and allow others to book it as well. You can find our podcast called Ashes to Rubies on any podcast stream.
We will also be growing our services in this new space. We teach a Recovery class Wednesday mornings already and are planning on a partner that specializes in acupuncture for those in early recovery and for those dealing with high anxiety and stress to start weekly services in the fall.
On our commercial side we are looking for provincial and national partners to distribute our kombucha (so if you know someone!!!) We still need a walk-in cooler, a new delivery vehicle and some other details to finish off our space. We feel we’ve come along way since signing our lease in February of this year and are happy with the results so far.
Please feel free to come for a quick tour and a booch or a coffee or tea!