The Trough

Babysitting a jar of jelly brain like structures called Kefir is more interesting than you might imagine.

drained kefir

They bubble away in a corner, after a couple of days they produce a liquid that can be used to ferment ginger juice into ginger beer. Or lemon juice into lemonade. Hurrah! well – the first lot went pink and tasted a little sour – the second lot was so spicy it made me sneeze… Hopefully this time I will get it right. The bacteria and yeast combo are quite addictive – I check them every morning and evening and remain mesmerized by their monotonous reproduction.

As they are apparently quite hard to kill  – we’ll see about that:)

Here are some pictures. So far I’ve had a few tips – don’t use metal they go a little grey and seem to loose some vitality. Apparently don’t use tap water because it has chlorine in it – hasn’t been a problem for me yet…

You can wash your skin with the water liquid or drink it straight – it tastes like TCP water. Soon I hope to get on to milk kefir – they take a while to learn how to digest the milk but will then turn it into a refreshing sour milk drink. mmm.

Bacteria bobbing away

Ginger Beer

This entry was posted by Gallus bankiva on Sunday, June 6th, 2010 at 7:22 pm. It is filed under Community Growing, bacteria, ferment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.