Morgan Mains

Made for batches of milk kefir using Cultures for Health grains and grass fed organic whole milk. All batches went through a maturing process to ensure all the lactose was consumed as I'm lactose intolerant. Last night I made a smoothie using about a half cup of the kefir. Tasted amazing! No adverse effects that night ( if there was in lactose left in it... t'would have been a loooong night =) Had another one this morning.

So looks like I'm well on my way to making my own milk kefir! =^.^=

I'm making my own kefir at home

In fact I've drank two smoothies now from the batches made over the last week. No adverse reactions to lactose so I'm sure it was all consumed in the fermentation process.

Since almond milk is technically water I used water kefir grains; not milk grains.

I'm pretty sure my problem was I used a fermentation lid with a bubbler. it wasn't able to breathe.

OK cool. I'll let it fester a few days in the fridge then =)

I forgot that to do the maturing process it needs to sit out and I put it in the fridge last night. Was hoping it would eventually finish off.

I have my second batch in the fridge. I'm lactose intolerant. Will the kefir continue to ferment and consume what's left of the lactose as it sits in the fridge? Or does the whole process stop?

Sounds good; thanks!

Ok great!

Do I need to rinse them before making a new batch?
How do I properly rinse them?

Thanks!

Someone on Facebook was nice enough to share their milk kefir grains with me. They sent them via mail in a padded envelope in a little tiny tupperware container in some milk. It's winter here so I'm assuming most of the time it was pretty cold. May have experienced some temp fluctuations in sorting centers and such.

I haven't had time to deal with them so I left them in the same milk and container they came in. They've been in my fridge for almost 3 weeks now. Looking at the container... it's pretty thick stuff now!

Questions:
Did I ruin them?
Is it OK to leave them in the same milk, in the fridge, for this long?
Do I need to 'revitilize' them or anything before I make a batch of kefir?

Please advise; thanks!

Very new to this and I started out making simple water kefir using Cultures for Health water kefir grains. Found those, glass jars, and fermentation lids at my local whole/natrual food store. It's going quite well; made a few batches and it turned out great!

Decided to take it up a notch and wanted to try some almond milk kefir recpies I found online. I'll explain how I made the batch and my questions will be at the bottom.

- Soaked raw almonds for over 24 hours in a tall plastic cup.
- Didn't have time to deal with it so I rinsed them and put them in the fridge for another 24+ hours.
- Ground up the almonds with the specified amount of water (sorry I can't get the link to the recpie right now).
- This produced a really nice, pure, almond milk... tastes amazing!
- Poured that into my nut milk bag and 'milked' it by hand into a tupperware container. Pretty sure my hands were... fairly clean =)
- Poured almost 2 cups of this almond milk into my jar.
- Added almost 3 tbl spoons of raw sugar (Sugar in the Raw).
- Put on the lid, popped in my bubbler, and set it in my cupboard.
- Room temp is about 65 to 70 degrees.

Checked on it the next morning and it had 'grown' up into the bubbler and was over flowing! Figured I had just over filled the jar. Took off the bubbler, rinsed it out, set aside. Through the hole in the top of the jar where the bubbler goes I held my finger over it so the kefir grains wouldn't pour out. Drained the jar so there was about an inch of headroom. Rinsed off the jar, put the bubbler back on, and put back in the cupboard.

Later that afternoon same thing happend! OK obviously my jar is too small. Wiped everything up, poured it into a cornel bowl, put a clean dish towel over top, and secured with a large rubber band.

Pulled it out the next day around noon thinking I'd have a tastey lunch treat! Wow... smelled very sour. I stired it gently with a spoon and touched my tounge to the spoon. No WAY I'm drinking that stuff! Tasted 10 times worse than it smelled. Well... ok... almond milk kefir fail.

Decided I'd just strain the grains out, rinse them off, and go back to simple water kefir. I have a nice, super fine, wire mesh strainer. it holds about a cup of stuff. I've used it several times when making water kefir and transfering the grains to the new jar. Based on that I expet to have a heaping pile of grains.

Poured some almond milk in and it filled the strainer quickly as this stuff was so coagulated and think. Gently ran a slow streem of water over the strainer to force out the crud and hopefully be left with my grains. Hmm... nothing left... ok the grains must be on the bottom of the bowl; that's fine.

Eventually went through the whole bowl... and was left with like 3 little weird looking grains. They weren't translucent like they were the other day and I'm missing like... 90+ % of them! Didn't want to even bother reusing them; they looked wierd, smelled weirder, and I had barely any left anyway.

QUESTIONS:
What happend to my water kefir grains?!
How do you properly rinse grains?
Any ideas why the almond milk kefir was bunk?

Thanks!