How To Make Water Kefir

What is water kefir?

Water kefir (pronounced keh-FEER) is a delicious fizzy probiotic drink that can be made at home very inexpensively. If you’ve seen how much fresh kefir costs in the stores, you’ll definitely want to make it at home. Water kefir is fermented at room temperature for 24-48 hours in a sugary water mixture. Fermented drinks such as water kefir are considered to be functional foods because they offer vitamins, minerals, enzymes, pre-digested nutrients, amino acids and billions of probiotics.

This is a great caffeine-free alternative to kombucha and what’s great about kefir is that the grains last indefinitely. As long as you take care of them in the proper way (and we’ll explain how) then they will keep producing lots of healthy probiotic kefir for you and your family.

Benefits of water kefir

The experience that each person has drinking a probiotic beverage will vary but many people (including ourselves) report noticeable health benefits. Water kefir supplies your body with billions of healthy bacteria, yeast strains along with valuable enzymes, easily digested sugars, beneficial acids, vitamins and minerals. All of this supports your internal micro flora which can improve and aid in your digestion. Some of the benefits we have noticed is that we get less gas (well I get less gas, Hannah doesn’t get gas hahah), less bloating and we feel like our digestion is much stronger than before drinking water kefir. I’ve also noticed that with the improved digestion, my acne has improved dramatically after consuming water kefir for a period of time. Other people notice better energy levels, they get less colds and viruses and some people drink it just because they enjoy the taste of it.

Drinking water kefir isn’t a magic bullet for your health problems but one reason why we recommend it is because it’s very easy and inexpensive to make at home and holds the possibility of improving your health dramatically. With anything we recommend, try it out for yourself and see how it affects your life or someone in your family.

Now let’s make some water kefir!

Ingredients for water kefir

• Water kefir grains (can be purchased on eBay or Amazon)
• Organic brown sugar
• Organic blackstrap molasses
• 1 quart (litre) spring water
• 2 glass mason jars - 1 quart
• A sheet of paper towel or a coffee filter
• Mason jar screw cap lid or rubber band or hair band
• Plastic strainer with nylon mesh
• Lemon (optional)
• Dried fruit (optional)

How to make water kefir

After you purchase your grains and they arrive, it may take 2 or 3 times of making water kefir for it to produce a nice zesty beverage. If you have purchased fresh grains online, they have already eaten through the nutrients in the liquid it was shipped in so it’s important to have the grains in sugar water as soon as possible.

There are many different recipes and types of sugar that you can use for making water kefir and in this post we are just sharing our basic recipe that has made us delicious kefir.

Fill up half of your mason jar with spring water. Water kefir typically prefers hard mineralized water (mineral water/spring water/well water). Soft water, filtered water, carbon-activated, ionized or otherwise altered water does not seem to encourage the same amount of growth or vitality in our experimentation. Reverse osmosis water can eventually lead to the death of the grains. I highly recommend using spring water that you can purchase from the grocery store if you don’t have another clean source.

Pour in 1/4 cup (or 3-4 tbsp) of the organic brown sugar and 1 tbsp of the molasses. Fill up the remaining of the mason jar until it is about 90% full. Use a plastic stirring stick (or the handle of a spatula or other plastic kitchen utensil) to mix the sugar and molasses until it is all dissolved.

At this point you can add in the optional lemon or dried fruit. The grains not only need sugar to live but they also need minerals to thrive and the lemon or dried fruit (along with the molasses) provide the necessary minerals for the kefir grains to keep producing.

To add in the lemon, just slice a lemon and put in either a quarter or an eighth of it. No need to squeeze the lemon, throw it in there with the peel still on it. You can also throw in some dried fruit, about 1/8 - 1/4 cup.

Now you can add in the grains and then cover the jar with either a paper towel or a coffee filter. Use a rubber band or hair band to secure the cover. You can also use the mason jar screw cap lid without the inner snap lid. By using a breathable cover, the kefir can breathe. If you seal the jar then it could cause an explosion because the kefir releases carbon dioxide as it ferments.

After the jar is covered, store it in a place that isn’t in direct sunlight and is at room temperature. You’ll want to let the kefir brew for about 24-48 hours. If you like it sweeter, brew for 24 hours, if you like it bitter, brew for 48 hours.

After the brewing period is complete, you will want to pour the finished kefir in to the 2nd mason jar through the nylon strainer in order to retrieve to the grains. Using a metal strainer can possibly damage the grains. To make more kefir just quickly rinse the grains off lightly in the strainer (tap water is fine for rinsing) and start at step 1 by making the water sugar solution above.

If you take proper care of the grains by only brewing for 24-48 hours and using hard mineralized water and adding in extra minerals (molasses, lemon, dried fruits), the grains will last indefinitely. We find that when we use molasses in our kefir, the grains multiply very quickly. What is nice about multiplying grains is that you can get more batches of kefir going at the same time so you could be drinking 1 quart every day if you let the batches brew for 48 hours. You can also share the grains with your friends and they can make their own kefir.

This is just a basic introduction to water kefir. There are so many more tidbits and information about it. If you’d like to learn more about water kefir, there is a huge resource of information by following this link.

You can purchase the water kefir grains on either Amazon or eBay. You can also search for ‘water kefir grains’ in google with the country you are in.

If you have any questions about water kefir, leave them below. Happy brewing!