On paper, it makes no sense.
Then again, nothing is quite what it seems at Hildegard Ferments and Botanicals.
The labor hours for Rosa Vissers’ elderberry syrup are more than she and her husband, Howard Kuo, can count. First, someone hand-harvests the berries. Next, Vissers manually strips the berries from the branches for the long process in which she prepares three separate infusions—with honey, alcohol, and water—that she later combines. Despite the extra effort and local, organic ingredients, Hildegard charges half the price commanded by commercial syrups.
That’s because here, the plants are running the show.
At this apothecary and nanobrewery, Vissers, an herbalist, handcrafts medicinal tinctures and balms, while Kuo, a brewer, makes artisanal beers and jun (a kombucha-like beverage). It’s located on the fringes of bustling Ballard, Seattle’s biggest brewery district, but it doesn’t have a taproom or even make an IPA; you can’t visit for happy hour or on the weekend circuit, because it’s only open two Sunday afternoons a month (or by appointment).
To enter the world of Hildegard is to immerse oneself in the sensory, deferring to divine forces whose presence is expressed through the sentience of even the tiniest forms of life. At its blink-and-you’ll-miss-it location—a plant-filled time capsule based in a former biscuit factory—Hildegard offers tastings and sells bottles of small-batch Saisons whose recipes are determined by the seasons, not supply and demand. Its founders host community gatherings that pair their beer with music and food, and Vissers teaches “plant talks and walks” that dive deeper into specific botanicals and where to discover them in the local environment. After all, many of the plants she and Kuo use are sourced from their own backyard.
“Helping others connect to plants is the bigger goal, but it makes it complicated to explain who we are in a snappy soundbite,” she says. “We like to work with our hands … but it’s not efficient or scalable, like you're supposed to be building your business.”
They reflect the industry’s underrepresented—Kuo is Chinese-American; Vissers is a Dutch woman immigrant—and collaborate with friends across Cascadia, part of a vision for a more balanced world.
Their philosophy is “get out of the way and don't fuck it up,” Kuo says. “There's wisdom in nature, in the organisms around us. We just try to be stewards of the fermentation.”
The late-summer sun slants through the pines as we meander through the Seattle Arboretum. Vissers is pointing out plants that appear along our winding path: mullein, with soft, floppy leaves like puppies’ ears, which soothes coughs and skin irritations; wild rose, heart-opening and calming; a grounding giant sequoia, which we hug. The experience soothes my nervous system, due in no small part to Vissers’ calming presence—equal parts motherly wisdom, childlike delight, Dutch sensibility, and mystic reverence.
“Helping others connect to plants is the bigger goal, but it makes it complicated to explain who we are in a snappy soundbite.”
She talks to the plants like the saint for which their business is named: Hildegard von Bingen, a 12th-century German nun, prophetess, and polymath who was the first documented European to put hops into beer. Guided by voices and visions, she was also a prolific composer, poet, and playwright, transcribing the divine tongue in as many ways as it was willing to talk. That included developing a system of natural medicine using plants, food, drink, and spiritual practices to keep the body in balance: a microcosm of the macrocosm.
Vissers and Kuo are similarly driven by “a deep respect for where things come from,” she says, “and the desire to be in relationship with the whole ecosystem that leads to a bottle.” Their process is devotional, mostly manual, and downright liturgical: connecting to the bigger picture; building reciprocal relationships with plants and people; respecting natural rhythms.
Vissers, prior to Hildegard, did a nine-month stewardship with City Fruit, a Seattle nonprofit that harvests and distributes fruit through food banks, meal programs, and farmers markets, and offers education. It buoyed her interest in city foraging; it also inspired her and Kuo to explore ciders, and they fell in love with funky European styles. While they can’t sell cider under the brewery’s current permit, they can coferment it with beer.
Such restrictions, Vissers says, can be a gift: “You have to go deep and make choices, and within that is freedom.” The end result: the Pomona series, an elegant cider-beer hybrid—energetic, slightly sweet, and balanced by earthy funk, tartness, and spice. For the 2022 blend, the pair took their 3-year-old daughter—an apple-cheeked, bright-eyed tyke named Tula—and Vissers’ parents on a scavenging mission around Seattle, gathering bruised and battered fruit to transform others’ rot and garbage into new life. They sourced from community relationships for the 2023 crop: a farm in Arlington and an organic orchard on Camano Island in addition to urban gathering.
“[Mixed-culture beers] are really interesting, because there are these waves of organisms that … eat sugar, and then others will come back through and clean it up. … There are arcs and inflows of different cultures that are more dominant at different times,” Kuo says. With the cofermentation, he adds, “you're introducing this whole other ecosystem of fruit. Whatever is on the skin and naturally occurring in the apple gets to express itself in this meshing of worlds.”
It’s the way the saint would have wanted it: Boundaries between realms dissolve into oneness, with the plants in charge.
On the apothecary side, most commercial preparations for elderberry syrup try to hasten extraction by boiling the berries for half an hour or longer. But this, Vissers says, destroys the structure of micronutrients like vitamin C and flavonoids: chemicals that give fruits, vegetables, and flowers color and antioxidants. Using only this method makes for a much less potent potion—but in Vissers’ triple infusion, the cooked mixture is combined with the cold-extracted batches, where nutrients remain intact.
“I feel like it's a more respectful way of working with the medicine … because you're not wasting so many things by just cooking them off,” she says. Meanwhile, the honey and alcohol act as preservatives, maximizing shelf life. “You have to know all these different methods of pulling the medicine out; that’s the science and art.”
Respect includes sustainability, in every sense of the word. Some of Hildegard’s products are higher-priced, but pint cans of Lux, an approachable, dry-hopped Pale, are cheaper than a draft pour at many neighboring taprooms. Meanwhile, apothecary staples like elderberry and echinacea tinctures are less than $15.
Vissers is careful to never harvest more than the environment can support. Usually, she harvests elderberries herself. This year, their friend Steph at Barmann Cellars—near the beer-loving town of Bellingham, Washington—not only harvested but donated them. “It’s the people’s medicine. [They] need it,” Vissers says. “I was gifted these elderberries, so that goes into the equation.”
Yet so much of the culture, beer and beyond, is doing different math.
“The limits are not the problem. It’s having to pretend they don’t exist that’s the problem,” Vissers says. “You can only get certain things fresh at certain times of year. Some years you get certain things more, and others less. … You leave things for other beings, and if there’s not that much, we don’t make a certain beer or medicine that year.”
“There’s wisdom in nature, in the organisms around us. We just try to be stewards of the fermentation.”
It’s a radical viewpoint, she acknowledges, in a world of perpetually stocked shelves, endless choices, where you can buy bananas in the Pacific Northwest in the middle of winter.
“We are much slower animals than we think,” says Vissers. “If you want new releases every day [that] you can get whenever you want, that’s not what we do. We offer depth and breadth.” Kuo finishes her sentence: “And what we make is deeply personal.”
Consigned to the abbey as a child, Hildegard von Bingen began hearing voices that she and the nuns ascribed to God. She was told to write down what she heard but literally couldn’t find the words—so she invented her own language, complete with an alphabet. Some think she meant it as a universal tongue, like the sensory dialects of food, drink, music, dance, and nature, which includes our own bodies.
And when we don’t listen, the latter, in particular, tends to shout.
Vissers always loved concocting plant-based potions, recalling her childhood in Holland, where she picked petals from neighborhood bushes and made rosewater in the canal. She’s also a dancer (she started conservatory training at age 12), choreographer, and yoga instructor. When she and Kuo got together in 2016, she was performing, teaching, doing choreography, and serving as executive director of Yoga Behind Bars (YBB), a Seattle nonprofit that brings trauma-informed yoga to incarcerated people.
While she found these pursuits fulfilling, they exacted a price—including multiple knee surgeries from dance-related injuries, and job-related stress. Periodically, she and Kuo would visit YBB funder Cody Swift’s rural property, which they called Linnell, finding respite among the pines and tending the orchard. Then, in 2017, a health scare snapped things into focus. Waiting for test results, Vissers recalls thinking: If it’s not what I want, what will I regret?
“If you want new releases every day [that] you can get whenever you want, that’s not what we do. We offer depth and breadth.”
The answer was clear. “I need to spend more time with the plants. That’s when I started on the path of not just tending flowers because they’re beautiful, but also learning about the medicinal aspects,” Vissers says, calling the moment a reality check. “On one hand, we have a lot of time—but also, let’s stop fucking around.”
She was already taking classes on permaculture design, organic gardening, and fruit tree stewardship. Vissers started making tinctures; friends and family loved them, and their kids even asked for them when sick or injured. “It was a respite, a way to come back to myself,” she says. Kuo felt the same about homebrewing, which he was doing after-hours from his full-time engineering job.
With Swift, they began envisioning a place of respite for everyone. They dreamed of transforming Linnell into a secular monastery of sorts, where folks could live and work in stewardship with the land, each other, and themselves. There would be permaculture projects, including a medicinal herb garden and an orchard; yoga and meditation classes; and a café and microbrewery with organic, regional foods, “brewing funky, fun, unconventional beer in the woods,” Kuo says.
They almost made it happen. Grand plans for Linnell never materialized, and everything changed again with the birth of their child. But their passion for food, beer, and medicine that encapsulates a slower, seasonal, more holistic time and place was undeterred.
Vissers left YBB, but co-founder Natalie Cielle remained a friend. Cielle started dating Brandon Pettit, the owner of Delancey, Ballard’s upscale pizza and Italian joint, who also helped incubate beloved local businesses Rachel’s Ginger Beer and Sea Wolf Bakery. Delancey also happened to throw an annual “Feast of Hildegard.” There, the couples bonded over mutual interests, and Kuo shared that he was a brewer. When he later dropped off samples to Pettit, they blew his mind.
During a dinner at Vissers and Kuo’s home in 2020, Pettit asked what Vissers wanted to do post-YBB. The couple described their vision for Linnell, and their friends encouraged them to run with the parts they could bring into reality. The seeds of the business took root: Vissers continued pursuing herbalism, Kuo honed his brews, and when they opened in October 2022, Pettit threw his reputational support and expertise behind the venture. Naturally, they named it after von Bingen.
Hildegard’s one-year anniversary was celebrated at Delancey’s 2023 feast, held on September 17, the saint’s official feast day, where Kuo’s beer shone in an elegant, multicourse pairing dinner that connected lovers of food, drink, and music across time and space. Today, the brewery and apothecary is “a little magic place full of plants and light, bright colors, [and] a wood-beamed high ceiling, like you stepped into a different time,” Vissers says. “We wanted to evoke the [sense of] respite, and hope people feel like they stumbled upon a secret.”
Hildegard’s specialty is understated Saisons, but what Kuo calls the “gateway beer” is Lux: a bright, approachable, dry-hopped Belgian-style Pale. It’s simple but, to me, offers more flavor and depth than many city taprooms’ standards.
For him, Saison is more an approach than a style, Kuo says. It blurs lines between beer and wine, calling value systems into question. “People are willing to drop $30 or more on wine because we’ve been trained that way, but they don’t make the jump that beer requires similar effort,” Vissers observes. The pair would like to see more restaurants with a beer list as curated as the wine, something their vision at Linnell entailed.
“I think simplicity is underrated and maybe misunderstood in our culture of big and weird,” says Vissers. “We like to come back to the basics, which are not basic; they are beautiful.”
While Kuo is quick to emphasize that they don’t make “medicinal beers,” wary of the images that might conjure, the world of Hildegard is one where medicine can taste good, and beer can possess qualities that support the whole system.
In von Bingen’s time—and long before—the lines between libation, medicine, sacrament, and sustenance blurred. Beer, the saint wrote, “positively affects the body when moderately consumed … [It] fattens the flesh and … lends a beautiful color to the face.” Hops, too, have medicinal properties, anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial as well as naturally calming. However, von Bingen believed hops caused “melancholy,” and pioneered their use as a preservative rather than sedative.
Her natural medicine books included lists of “healthy” foods and drinks, and beer and wine were on them next to things like squash, radishes, and one of her favorites, spelt: a hearty, ancient wheat that has been cultivated since 5,000 B.C. It has impressive health properties, including fiber, protein, and vitamins and minerals like iron and magnesium; Kuo uses it in several of Hildegard’s beers.
von Bingen concocted cures from what flowered and grew around the monastery, combining physical treatments with spiritual healing. For her, health was a framework factoring in body, mind, and soul that saw humans as an extension of nature, all of it divine.
“I think simplicity is underrated and maybe misunderstood in our culture of big and weird. We like to come back to the basics, which are not basic; they are beautiful.”
Her namesake’s products are a sensory journey through the fields, forests, alpine crags, and coastlines of the Pacific Northwest, using largely organic ingredients—sourced, when possible, from the friends Vissers and Kuo have made in their sometimes circuitous intersections with Cascadia’s food, beverage, agricultural, and botanical communities. They meet growers at farmers markets and through friends; others seek them out because of their mission. One of their beers uses fresh hops donated by their neighbor, who grows them in his garden. The beer is named after him: Griggs.
The beers provide simple palates for complex, nuanced flavor, body, and texture, equally suited to drinking with dinner or sipping in meditative fashion. The tinctures are tasty enough to be cocktail bases, well-rounded with the supple herbaceousness of an amaro.
Through the apothecary, Vissers offers education and one-on-one consultations; designs culinary and medical herb gardens; and makes both stock and custom tinctures, salves, and balms. While each tends to stick to their wheelhouse, the brewery and apothecary inform each other, and both make use of fruits, herbs, flowers, and trees.
The company’s jun is their direct collaboration. A bright, quick-fermenting beverage sometimes called “the champagne of kombucha,” jun is 1-2% ABV and brewed with green tea and honey instead of black tea and cane sugar. Hildegard’s version—called Viriditas Jun—is bright, crisp, and mineral-rich with balanced herbaceousness, pairing Sencha green tea with aromatic geranium and Strata hops.
Von Bingen often wrote of “viriditas,” or “greenness” in Latin, meaning vitality and growth, to describe the divine nature of the Earth body, reflected in human bodies and souls. “That greening power is in all of us,” Vissers says. “Whether it’s the apothecary or the brewery, we want what we make to be alive, and make you feel connected to life.”
That includes not just comestibles, but music—another thing for which von Bingen is famous, as one of written history’s first composers. Her songs were as boundary-defying as her medicine, including hymnals that inspired what Vissers calls the “death-metal demon voice,” complete with instructions for producing the correct discordant tones.
After all, von Bingen was a complicated figure. She stood up to church elders she felt were abusing their power, starting her own convents where nuns wore flowing linens and let their hair down. Yet she maintained many staunch Catholic beliefs, warning against homosexuality even as she fought to keep one of her more attractive sisters from being transferred.
We’re all products of our programming. Vissers and Kuo get it. The pair wrestle with the paradox of trying to build something bigger than themselves while being the face of their “brand,” and they struggle even more with how to address their underrepresented identities. “I don't want to tokenize myself,” Kuo says. “Just one look at our Instagram feed, and they'll know that I'm Asian. Why do I have to tell them?”
Both believe identity can be used as a bridge or a cudgel, including “as a way to mask the lack of actual substance,” Vissers says. But it’s complicated: “The things we make can speak for themselves. And we can also let people know that they are the way they are because of who we are.”
“ Whether it’s the apothecary or the brewery, we want what we make to be alive, and make you feel connected to life.”
Kuo says he has been treated differently in the beer world and beyond for his background; according to Vissers, his family taught him to work hard and suffer indignities in silence. Both say they continually struggle with imposter syndrome.
Frankly, they’d rather not have to sell anything at all, but it’s the system in which we live. “There’s the part where you’re working and making things, and you really enjoy it; you feel connected,” Kuo says. “Then there’s the other part where you’re trying to sell it, and it feels like a failure.”
Vissers and Kuo don’t try to isolate themselves, but they often feel adrift. It’s a sentiment many can identify with post-pandemic, yet the anomie is as old as industrialization, and maybe even older.
The mission statement for Linnell read: “We aspire to move and grow in alignment and harmony with the seasons and cycles of nature. This means spending significant time observing, being, and listening … [and] stepping away from a growth mindset where more and faster is always better.” They’re hardly alone; so many others dream of something more.
The pair still dream of bringing a larger vision to life. For now, they work with what the environment can support. And the reach is bigger than it appears on the surface, a root system that runs through city and monastery, farm and field, forest and meadow: anywhere the plants sprout.
“We wanted our kid to see that we don’t have a place to stand if we’re talking about things we value and not doing them,” Vissers says. “We talk about the future like a far-off place, but it starts today.”
Saint Hildegard would agree.
Words by Holly ReganPhotos by Dave Riddile
