Water Kefir

Lately this has been my activity once every two days - feeding my water kefir grains and bottling/flavoring the water for secondary fermentation.

I had very little knowledge of kefir and had only heard of milk kefir. Thanks to my cousin's wife, Sofia, who gifted my mum a bottle of her homemade water kefir, I was introduced to this probiotic drink.

When I tasted Sofia's water kefir for the first time, I immediately loved it. It was effervescent and had a deep flavor, very much like beer! At the time, I had no idea that what I was drinking was water kefir.

When I asked my mum, she had forgotten what Sofia told her hah..hah... but she managed to ask Sofia and that was how I got into making water kefir.

I did some research on Youtube and I realized that people have been making water kefir ages ago. I am so slow to catch on.

So my first step was to purchase the water kefir grains online. It is quite pricey but I realized that the grains will multiply and I will never run out of water kefir grains.

Let me show you what's in this mysterious jar.

This had been fermenting for approximately 48 hours.

Lots of bubble and it had a nice yeasty aroma. I decided to flavor the water kefir with blueberries and lemon.

I defrosted some frozen blueberries and mashed them to extract the juice.

I did not purposely buy this since this packet was already in my freezer.

Then I poured the blueberry juice into a bottle. I also added the juice of half a lemon.

After that I poured the water kefir into the bottle. I also added some fresh blueberries for good measure.

When fresh fruits are added, the fermentation process speeds up.

I let the bottle stand at room temperature for another 48 hours and I made sure to release the gas once per day. This thing can become very fizzy and I have experienced liquid gushing out of the bottle like champagne.

Time to taste!

Oh! Very nice! But it was not as fizzy as expected because I had already opened the bottle earlier (because I could not resist a taste!).

These are the water kefir grains after I strained off the liquids. It's really very simple to make another fresh batch. 

I am following the supplier's recipe which is 1/3 cup sugar to 800ml water. I am using organic cane sugar and bottled mineral water.

Return the water kefir grains back into the jar (I use the same jar up to two or three times and after that I will start with a clean jar) and pour in the sugar water.

Then cover the jar with a cloth (again I used the same cloth and change when I use a clean jar) and leave to ferment for 48 hours.

This one I flavored with apple juice (2nd fermentation for another 48 hours) and it was very fizzy. Please don't mind the "branded" bottle. I bought this bottle of expensive water (I first got acquainted with this water here . I think it retails at RM9+ and the restaurant charged RM20.00 for it. Tsk!) because I wanted the glass bottle.

I am enjoying making and drinking water kefir. There are a lot of resources out there (some can be confusing) on how to make water kefir and I will do another post on how I handle mine.