Kefir on offer

My pot of kefir, brewing gently, and my nearly empty jug of ‘brewed’ kefir

A quick search of this blog reveals that I have been posting, on and off, about kefir since 2011 – and that the kefir that I have posted about has always come from Sue Cane, our gluten free beer expert. Sue originally inherited the grains from her dad, a great kefir enthusiast. So, one way and another, they must have been going now for knocking on 50 years. Well, maybe a great longer as we don’t know (unless Sue does?) where they originally came from.

Anyhow, after a gap of some years on my behalf, when I stayed with Sue during the gloriously free months of the summer, she gave me another small pot of grains. I brought them back to London and decided that if I was going to ‘do’ kefir again, I should ‘do’ it properly, as I did some years ago, with raw Guernsey milk – thus giving the grains the full range of bacteria to work on and produce the ultimate nourishing elixir.

(Obviously this would be absolutely not be an option for those who are allergic to cow’s milk, but a significant proportion of those who just find pasteurised cow’s milk difficult to tolerate do well on raw cow’s milk. And of course you can also make kefir with goat or sheep milk , both raw and pasteurised. Although it makes no logical/medical sense, while there are no restrictions on buying raw goat or sheep’s milk, raw cow’s milk can only be bought ‘at the farm gate’. (Thank you dairy industry.) For anyone wanting to read more about raw milk – and indeed A2 milk – see this section on the FoodsMatter website.)

But back to the kefir. I ordered my milk from Hurdlebrook Farm…

… and off I went – or, strictly speaking, off went the kefir. In the few months since I brought it back from Sue it has all but tripled in size and is now seriously outgrowing both its pot and my capacity to eat it.

So, if anyone would like a ‘starter pack’ I would be more than happy to send you one in the post. Either email me or put a comment on this blog with your name and address and I will send it off.

If you have made kefir before, you are away. If not, check in to this post on which you will find Sue’s great little video telling you how to do it . And/or check in to this article by Gill Jacobs on the FoodsMatter site.

You can perfectly well make your kefir with ordinary supermarket milk (although do try to go for organic and non-homogenised) but if you want to go for raw milk and you are nowhere near Somerset where Hurdlebrook have their Guernsey herd, the Raw Milk Suppliers website offers you dozens of suppliers all across the country.

I probably have enough to send out two small pots so, if you are interested, send me your details as soon as possible.