Fermentation by Rachel de Thample

Author:Rachel de Thample
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781526612502
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Carbonating your drinks

Your bottles need to be cleaned with hot soapy water and rinsed thoroughly. They don’t need to be sterilised as such and you definitely don’t want to be pouring cool or room temperature liquid into hot bottles or they’ll shatter.

Using a lipped measuring jug and a funnel, pour your drinks into the bottles, ensuring there is 2–3cm headspace at the top; this gives a little space for building carbonation. Seal the bottles with a cork or a stopper – corks are best as they’ll pop out if the carbonation builds too much. If you seal the bottle with an airtight lid you run the risk of the bottle exploding if too much carbonation builds up.

The carbonation of your drinks will increase in the bottles as the good bacteria continue to consume the remaining sugars and create carbon dioxide – in a sealed bottle there’s nowhere for this building carbonation to go, so it stays in the bottle in the form of bubbles. As the sugars are consumed, the drink also becomes less sweet. So, the longer you leave your drinks to mature, the fizzier and sharper they will become.

If you store your drinks for more than 2–3 days, open them every day or so to release some of the gas, then reseal – this is known as ‘burping’ your bottles.

Alcohol content

The sugars will also start to convert to alcohol – the more sugar you start with, the higher the alcohol per volume will be. Thus, ginger beer can become more alcoholic than water kefir as it’s brewed with 150g sugar per 1 litre, as opposed to water kefir which has 45g sugar per 1 litre.

Water kefir

Effervescent, elegant and, to my mind, as close to wine as you can get without alcohol, water kefir is definitely my favourite virgin tipple. It may be unfamiliar to many of us nowadays, but it’s been consumed for hundreds of years. In the late 1800s, for instance, kefir grains were used in Mexico to ferment a drink from the sweetened juice of the prickly pear cactus. Other documentation identifies the use of kefir grains in the Caucasus mountains, Tibet and Ukraine.

Water kefir takes only 2 days to brew and is incredibly good for you. The opaque, crystal-like grains used to make it contain more than 30 strains of beneficial bacteria and although it’s brewed with sugar (3 tbsp per 1 litre) the fermentation process reduces the sugar by around two-thirds, leaving just 1 tbsp sugar per litre or 3.5g per 250ml glass. (For contrast, the same sized glass of cola typically contains around 20g sugar.)

Consuming water kefir moderately is a great way to introduce a variety of good bacteria to your gut. A 250ml glass a day is a recommended serving size. Of course, as with all fermented food, you should start off with just a little and increase gradually, seeing how your body responds.

Obtaining water kefir grains

You can obtain water kefir grains online (happykombucha.co.uk is my go-to source) though you may well

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