henager.net

There's Kefir in My BeerOctober 08, 2009

Here’s my latest home-brew — first one without a recipe! It’s creamy and foamy, sweet and thick. Bo says you should name all your beers, so I christen this one Grendel Brindle Stout. The hops are very present, but the dark and chocolate malt stands up to them, in my opinion.

This brew is unique in that I used Kefir grains instead of regular yeast. They worked really well, though I can’t see that they stand any real advantage. I was hoping to see if they could help kill other bacteria or help speed the fermentation process, but I don’t think they helped all that much. They also purportedly add health benefits, so there’s that.

I brewed two gallon jugs and bottled one at a week of fermentation and the second at two weeks. I opened the first batch a few times during the process to test killing bacteria and the other as a control. Strangely, the first batch had matured to optimum drinkability at about two weeks in the bottle, and was really delicious, but the second jug is the one that took on harmful bacteria. It has a very slight off taste that the first one didn’t have. This could possibly be because the Kefir was still more active at bottling of the first batch, but I tend to think that it just took that long for the off taste to really manifest.

I’ll probably brew more with Kefir since I have quite a few of the grains in my fridge and I can keep them growing from batch to batch, but I’ll probably stick to commercial yeast for my large batches.

Here’s the recipe. I boiled the mixture for about 50 minutes. It should also be noted that this is very low alcohol content. It’s probably somewhere below 3.0.
2 gallons of spring water
3.3lb Dark Malt Extract
4oz Chocolate Malt
.75oz Kent Golding hops (all bittering, full boil — this is a backbone to the malt)
2tbsp Kefir grains per gallon jug

Food