At Sideyard, Sarah Bourke Refreshes Small Farms Through Fruit-Infused Vinegars

In 2019, while at the music festival BottleRock Napa Valley, Sarah Bourke, founder of fruit-infused vinegar company Sideyard, had a cocktail and an epiphany. She recalls sipping “one of the most interesting, delicious, unique things” she’d ever tasted. The tequila-based turmeric shrub drink – a shrub is a sweet and tangy drinkable vinegar – “was not overwhelmingly sweet, it was complex and so flavorful in a way that’s not overpowering,” she says. “Super refreshing and satisfying.”

Bourke was hooked. She had been making kombucha at home and began making shrubs. It was early in the pandemic, and as she walked her neighborhood, she started taking note of the fruit trees in her neighbors’ side yards and foraging for fruit to use. Initially a hobby, the results of which were shared with family and friends, Sideyard Shrubs, now Sideyard, was born.

“I love making, drinking, cooking, and sharing them with people,” she says of the locally sourced, fruit-infused vinegars she crafts by hand. “Not everybody loves shrubs like I do, but I do think a certain type of person, you almost crave it,” she adds. “It’s unique. And it’s a beautiful thing to work in.”

Sideyard is a fitting expression of Bourke’s interests in agriculture, food, farming, small business, and storytelling. Influenced growing up in a large extended family with many traditions surrounding food, gathering, and community in outdoorsy Southern California, she also learned lessons in having a homegrown business from her parents — successful small lot producers who started making wine in trash cans in their garage.

Traditional shrubs include some form of sweetener. While Bourke started out crafting shrubs that way, over time her philosophy and formula have evolved to where she now considers her product a fruit-infused vinegar inspired by shrubs and the culture around them. No sweetener is added, allowing the fruit’s flavor to shine through. Though Bourke enjoyed the shrubs’ sweet syrupiness, she’s gravitated towards cleaner eating with little processed sugar. Drinkers have the option of adding sweeteners like agave to their beverage, but she prefers her current formula, using unfiltered organic apple cider vinegar as the only other ingredient. Bourke’s use of a cold process rather than a hot method to produce the vinegar enhances the clean product and purity of flavor. Sideyard vinegars are fruity and bracing, like a tonic, and a little goes a long way. They can be used in beverages, marinades, and salad dressing or for pickling; the kumquat is lovely in a dressing for a spinach salad with oranges and red onion.

While Bourke still forages fruit from side yard farmers she knows well, once she got a cottage permit to produce in her apartment kitchen, she began purchasing product from certified or practicing organic and non-profit farms in the Santa Barbara region.

Integral to the business and a source of pride is her support of those local producers, a connection that stretches far deeper than simply purchasing their product; she views them as farm partners and wants to use her vinegars to help tell their stories. An environmental studies major at UC Santa Barbara, she’s volunteered extensively at farms, including a stint as a WWOOFer at a farm in Maui. “I’ve really taken an interest in how to grow food, take care of fruit trees and farmers, people who commit their lives professionally to growing food,” she says.

Bourke has cultivated meaningful relationships with her farm partners, spending time at the farms and frequently helping harvest, and feels they are like family. Each is featured on Sideyard’s website and in regular consumer communication and is named on the bottle containing the fruit that was sourced there. Sharing stories of producers with whom she’s proud to work, whether they’re growing in their side or front yard or on a 15- acre ranch, is her way of celebrating small-scale agriculture.

“There’s something really beautiful about the complexities of working with smaller scale farmers who aren’t producing hundreds or thousands of pounds of produce and as a business owner working with them directly to create a revenue stream for selling produce, they might otherwise not be able to,” says Bourke. This includes buying “seconds,” the bruised fruits at which many look askance when shopping, to help build demand.

While Sideyard is currently a side business for Bourke — she works full-time in communications for organic food companies — she intends to continue doing both with the future goal of working just on the company. Only last year did she move production from her second- floor, one-bedroom apartment to a nearby commercial kitchen. She and her husband handle production, bottling, and packaging on weekends; administrative work is done on weeknights. Sideyard products can be ordered online through the website or purchased at 250 farm stores and small independently owned, value-aligned outlets across the country.

Crafting these vinegars is not simply a culinary enterprise, but a social and ethical one as well. “I try to live my life that way and buy and eat food in a way that honors our regional landscape and regional growers,” she says. “I find that to be really meaningful and significant and something I value.”