Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

• proper fruit wines haven’t turned out the best.
• water kefir is always either overcarbonated or undercarbonated. Have eventually been figuring out what’s up. The results are weird and unexpected!
  • nettle leaves as addons will make the ferment go crazy!
• pasturizing without losing the proper health profile and flavor and texture
• consistency / knowing what it might taste and feel like before going in
  • I’ve been really poor with consistency over the last 7 years, mostly still in experimental phase, but consistency increasing.
• aligning production cycle and consumption cycle
  • I ferment in big batches, but consumption doesn’t happen that way. As a result, there’s ‘feast and famine’ cycle of output vs consumption. If I can ‘smoothen’ the peaks and troughs, will be able to do quicker experiments, newer drinks, more explorations.

A large percentage of my performance has been successful. Even if something doesn’t work out, there’s an easy way to recover it by giving it more time, adding more nutrition, or adding Pierre, making pH changes, adding more sugar, and so forth. However, there are still a lot of ferments that have failed.

In this post, I’ll share some of them. I like to think of fermentation and brewing not as a strict science like baking, but more like cooking, where there’s a lot of flexibility to adapt, improve, and try to recover from a potential failure. Despite that, you can always overcook your chicken, burn your lentils, and there’s no recovering from that.

Here are some examples. Number one, my fruit wines have mostly been crap. They often have a slight sulfuric taste and are cloyingly sweet without much additional sugar. I understand it’s got to do with temperature control, and all of this could be fixed with additional yeast, nutrition, and so forth. I have started going away from fruit ferments in recent years because they’re too finicky, and I don’t want to be babysitting my brews all the time.

My water kefir first fermentation often is fine, but the second fermentation seems to be a little finicky. It’s always over-carbonated or under-carbonated, and I can’t ever tell exactly why things turn out this way. I have been learning more and figuring out what affects what. For example, my milk-water kefir mixture that I’ve talked about in a different post has a tendency to over-carbonate for some reason, so I need to be careful with the sugar content there. The results are weird and unexpected, and it’s always a surprise to find out what’s next. Again, there’s often little disappointment, but an opportunity to learn.

Interestingly, flavorings and herbs added to ferments have created distinct outcomes, and I’m quite interested by why that might be the case. For example, adding nettle leaves to my secondary fermentation will make the brew go crazy with over-carbonation. My personal theory is, since it’s mostly greens, and my ferments might be lacking in nitrogen, when they get an oversupply of nitrogen, they go on an overdrive in reproduction and ingestion and over-carbonate as a result. That’s just a hypothesis; I can’t be sure about it. Third, pasteurizing without losing the proper health profile, flavor, or texture.

Truth be told, I’ve never pasteurized my brews properly. You need pasteurization only if you want to have your brews stable at room temperature—by stable, I mean the fermentation has stopped, your brew’s final flavor has stabilized, and you could put it on shelves for years and months without the fear of exploding bottles from over-carbonation or degrading taste due to oxidation. I just store them in the fridge instead. Traditionally, in Eastern cultures, folks usually don’t pasteurize. They either dig ditches in the ground and store their brews in there to maintain the constantly cold temperature, or store them at room temperature with the understanding that the flavor is going to get sour by the week, and the earlier you consume it, the quicker you get done with the drink. I understand, as I store these in the fridge, that I’m using a lot of energy to keep these at a stable temperature, and also, they occupy a lot of premium fridge space in my little single-bedroom downtown apartment. So, figuring out proper pasteurization would be ideal, but that’s not been my dream yet. If I ever invest in a circulation heater, I’d probably be much better at this. If I find something for 10 bucks or so, I’d be down to try it. If you have one to donate and are willing to ship it to me in Seattle, please reach out to me at my email address.

Fourth, consistency. Often, there’s a lot of uncertainty going into a brew—what it might taste and feel like until the brew is complete. I’ve been brewing since 2017, and it’s been eight years as I write this in 2025, and I’m still more or less in an experimentation phase. My consistency has been getting better, particularly with kombucha, milk kefir, and rice wine, but the more consistent I get, the more daring I am with trying new experiments. So, there’s a lot of new exploration and understanding and not much consistency yet.

Truth be told, I do believe that consistency is overvalued. Consistency is achievable only at a large industrial scale and still be affordable. To keep things consistent at a small scale can turn out to be quite expensive and often not worth the effort. Besides, if we want to accept things for what they are, the need for consistency goes down. For example, brews made in the winter are often less harsh, lower in alcohol, and sweeter because they’ve been brewed in lower temperatures. Summer brews are more alcoholic, sour, and have a more alcoholic funk. If you accept and internalize that what you’re drinking and what you’re sharing with your friends and family is the taste of the flavor and surroundings and the circumstances around which the brews were made, it becomes a lot more palatable. Every brew needs to tell a story, and the stories are consistent and uniform. A factory batch tells is that it was made in a large factory that needs to cater to the taste of millions and billions without room for the tiniest of errors. If that’s not what you want, consistency might not be what you want to prioritize. What you should consider doing is setting expectations for your customers, telling them the story of their brew, and explaining to them why a certain brew might be on the rougher side or on the bitter side or on this or that side. For example, if there are experimental brews with weirder, stronger-flavored flowers, I give a heads-up to my friends. “You can go back to the sweet brew if you want to, but this one is interesting and tastes funkier. Feel free to be offended if you want to.” I found that people are surprisingly open to new and slightly unpleasant experiences, and this even opens up their consideration and their understanding of what good and acceptable flavors are. In the end, if you find that some of your batches are not up to your standards, you can always create a blend with your better batches and get a larger, semi-decent, uniform-ish batch. That’s what I do towards the end of my brewing cycles.

Fifth, aligning the production cycle and consumption cycle. I ferment in big batches, but consumption doesn’t happen that way. People don’t—my friends don’t drink in the four-gallon batches that I brew. As a result, there’s a feast-and-famine cycle of fermentation versus consumption. There are months when I have an oversupply of brews that I need to get rid of, and then months I have nothing to share with my friends because the brews are in progress. If I can smooth the peaks and troughs of my brewing cycle, I’ll be able to iterate on the experiments quicker, come up with newer, more exciting recipes, do more explorations, and basically improve techniques quicker. This is the way I’m going, and there are a lot of opportunities for growth.