During the severe thunderstorm that swept through Pittsburgh in April, Trevor Ring was teaching a fermentation class at Jackworth Ginger Beer.
Through his fermentation business and educational organization, Community Cultures, he offers a catalogue of events and workshops. Topics span the basics of fermentation, featuring well-known foods like sauerkraut and salsa, to fermented beverages like kombucha and kefir, to more advanced pickling and preservation techniques. With a goal to make fermentation education accessible to all, he holds workshops throughout the region — going from libraries and community centers to partnering with organizations like Community Kitchen Pittsburgh, Phipps Conservatory, and Jackworth, where the brewery’s signature drink is a naturally fermented ginger beer.
Trying to broaden the April workshop’s appeal to different groups, “I was interested to see if I could get some preppers out,” Ring tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “I was just messing around with different marketing, so I called the class, ‘Fermenting Veggies for the Apocalypse.’”
“If you’re interested in learning how to preserve your food, get into fermentation, learn more life/survival skills, and prepare for … who knows what, then this is the workshop for you!” he wrote in the class’s description.
As Ring demonstrated how to preserve pickles, the storm descended on the city with 90-mile-per-hour winds, knocking out the neighborhood’s power seemingly everywhere but the class at Jackworth.
“People were learning about how to preserve food without refrigeration, through fermentation,” Ring says, also seeing the humor in the situation. Not anticipating that some participants would be without power for days, he was glad “they were able to have safe, freshly fermented food available to them.”
Increasing food’s shelf life is one of numerous benefits of fermentation, whose practitioners tout its ability to enhance nutrition and flavor, reduce food waste, and potentially improve health and wellness, even benefitting the digestive system or gut microbiome.
Though humans have been fermenting food and beverages for millennia, the practice has been repopularized over the last 25 years, landing foods like sauerkraut, kimchi, and fermented blueberries in high-end restaurants. Pittsburghers have embraced the fermented food trend in their own kitchens, Ring says, seeking health benefits, connection to heritage and traditions, eco-friendliness, possible savings, and foodie novelty.
The list of fermented foods is broad, but during a recent class at Chantal’s Cheese Shop — Community Cultures’ first in the space — Ring defined fermentation simply as “the transformative process of microorganisms.” During fermentation, “everything from mold to yeast to specific strains of bacteria” breaks down food, alters its flavor, and preserves it.
Ring often begins Community Cultures classes by pointing to a map, noting that anywhere in the world, you can find fermented food: sauerkraut throughout Germany and Eastern and Central Europe, kombucha from China, and kimchi from Korea.
“It would actually be hard to go through your day without consuming some fermented product,” he says, naming bread, alcohol, vegetables, cheese, vanilla, chocolate, and tea.
Students at the “Pickling Spring Veggies through Fermentation” class ranged from first-timers to repeat participants. As Ring expected, they joined for a variety of reasons: hoping to preserve vegetables from a backyard garden; improve technique after mixed results pickling an onion; make sauerkraut after seeing older generations do it; reconnect with pickling vegetables after immigrating from Romania; and a last-minute invitation from a friend.
Even Chantal’s co-owners, husband-and-wife team Anaïs Saint-André Loughran and Chris Loughran, sat in to learn and look for parallels to their specialty. (“When you’re talking about fermentation, it’s like, ‘That’s cheese!’” Anaïs said.)
While some might be familiar with “quick pickling,” or pickling food and vegetables with vinegar, Ring and Community Cultures teach wild fermentation (or lacto-fermentation), a “great gateway” into the practice, Ring says. The beginner version immerses chopped vegetables in a saltwater brine to ferment lactic acid bacteria already naturally present on the vegetable. The fermentation process safely preserves the food — or “if it’s under the brine, all is fine,” as Ring puts it — as well as adding flavor, enhancing vitamin content, and breaking down toxins.
Another element of fermentation is honoring seasonality. For the class, Ring recommends an asparagus and bean ferment, which, in addition to being uncommon, Ring says, “is very fun, and just preserves the moment, that short moment of asparagus in spring.”
In a glass jar, students add spices to their salt brine, dropping in garlic, red pepper flakes, bay leaves, and cracked black peppercorn after the chopped vegetables. After one to three weeks of fermentation, the process will yield softened, uniquely flavored veggies like Community Cultures’ lemongrass brussel sprouts or ginger- and fennel-infused carrots.
“I think it’s like magic,” one student said.
Foodie culture has taken a keen interest in fermented foods, particularly made from wild or foraged products, for these singular flavors. Fermented sodas, and the search for the perfect “pine needle Sprite,” are a recent TikTok obsession, Ring says. (You can find Community Culture’s recipe for wild fermented pine soda online, or try Ring’s sodas and other fermented products at the Bloomfield Saturday Market.)
Though culinary experimentation remains a draw, Ring came to fermentation in college through some “very strong dorm-brewed” kombucha (a fermented black tea) that he made under his bed. After suffering from digestive issues, he “experienced pretty profound effects” when eating fermented foods, spurring him to learn more about food production and agriculture.
Ring describes fermentation as a “middle space” between food production and preservation, and has been teaching workshops about it for more than a decade. After moving to Pittsburgh in 2017, he believes he teaches the most fermentation classes in the region.
As far as solidifying Pittsburgh’s interest, Ring also credits Justin Lubecki, founder of Ferment Pittsburgh, who started the Pittsburgh Fermentation Festival in 2016, and later folded fermentation into the larger Pittsburgh County Fair. Both Pittsburgh festivals not only helped grow fermentation education locally, says Ring, but “created this space for fermentation to be this celebratory, artistic, fun, DIY type of thing.”
The pandemic brought even greater enthusiasm, and during lockdown periods, Ring spent time at virtual fermentation festivals and saw “people just nerding out about it.”
“Because what else are you going to do if you’re at home?” he says. “Like many other things during the pandemic, it did seem to create a pretty big spark.”
As much as Ring has seen and even helped facilitate a fermented foods trend, he still draws inspiration from his teacher and mentor Sandor Katz, dubbed the “godfather of fermentation revival” by GQ for the release of his 2003 book Wild Fermentation. Ring quotes Katz, who affirms fermentation is an ancient practice, saying, “It’s not a fad, it’s a fact.”
Meryem Mammedova of Prescription Foods, a Pittsburgh fermented foods company, tells City Paper she’s also seen undeniable benefits firsthand. She and her husband, self-described fermentation enthusiasts and food activists, started their business in 2015 with a focus on nutritional education. She thinks the health component of fermented foods has become a huge draw as public concern about food sensitivities and overall health consciousness has grown.
While foodies and environmentally-conscious consumers represent one segment of people eating fermented foods, “my approach is more like, this is medicine,” Mammedova says. “We believe these are healing foods.”
Similar to Ring’s experience, Mammedova found fermented foods while experiencing gut issues after taking an antibiotic. Her health problems worsened, spiraling into depression, fatigue, weight gain, and cold sores, she says, until she changed her diet. As a toddler, her son also had multiple food allergies and lactose intolerance until the family incorporated fermented foods.
Taking suggestions from both Sandor Katz and the best-selling book The Body Ecology Diet, Mammedova remembers going to the Strip District to shop for coconuts to make into coconut kefir water, a fermented drink that she says helped her son eat dairy again.
She adapted the recipe for Prescription Foods’ local product line, which now includes cultured coconut water, Cofir, and coconut yogurt, or Cogurt (available at the East End Food Co-op, where Mammedova also teaches occasional classes). The family also made sauerkraut at home, echoing when Mammedova got together with her aunts and cousins to chop cabbage in the fall, which became the basis for Prescription Foods’ sauerkraut.
While flavor will always be important to some, “I say, change your mindset about fermented foods,” Mammedova says, recommending people use a “baby step approach” to introduce small amounts of healthier foods into their diets, similar to adding a condiment. “There are fermented foods that are more for taste, like kombucha … but they don’t offer [many] health benefits. My goal is helping people heal.”
Sticking with a multi-pronged approach, Ring is gearing up for a kefir and wild soda workshop at the end of June, and a class with natural wine shop Nine O’Clock Wines to coincide with Picklesburgh.
Though pickle-loving Pittsburghers should naturally gravitate toward fermented foods, Ring points out that most pickles are made with vinegar.
“So [in my work], I’m teaching people about the history and the tradition of pickling, [how] back in the day, people weren’t using vinegar, pre-Industrial Revolution,” Ring says. “Pickles can be nice and tasty as well, but I think [about] that nuanced flavor, and that connection to tradition, and that could be beneficial.”
This article appears in Jun 11-17, 2025.
