#diy fermentation

Production notes:

I don't have any fancy fermentation equipment. Just using empty plastic bottles that had mineral water in them - 1.25ml

Wrote labels on the outside of each bottle before beginning. Date and contents. Always important to do that when you're fermenting stuff, and I always do it at the beginning because it's easiest to do when the bottles are dry and empty. Just used a sharpie to write directly on the plastic: "16/11/24 tepache [variety]"

4 bottles per 1 pineapple is probably too much? Last time I made it I did 3 bottles, and there was plenty of rind/core for each bottle. Maybe I just used a bigger pineapple last time idk. Anyway, there's not a huuuge amount of pineapple rind in these bottles so idk how it will turn out. There's definitely enough yeast and sugar in there to get the fermentation going at least.

There's a bit over ½ a cup of sugar in each bottle? Couldn't find the measuring cups so I was using the liquid-measuring jug and just eyeballing it. Couple tablespoons of raw sugar and then topped up the rest with brown sugar. (Cuz there was the end of a package of raw sugar to use up, but plenty of brown, so I just divvied up the raw between the four bottles)

There's enough sugar in there for almost a litre of water to be saturated, and have some undissolved sugar fall out of suspension pretty quickly. Plus there's the additional sugars of the pineapple juice. Probably a little bit too much sugar, but it'll give the yeast plenty to eat so 🤷🏻‍♂️

Added a cup of so of water and gave the bottle a good shake to get the sugar somewhat dissolved:

Then I did the dry spices:

Half a stick of cinnamon in each bottle. This was comprised of one quarter stick of very old and very stale cinnamon that I found in the pantry, and one quarter stick of fresh brand new cinnamon that I bought yesterday. Should balance I hope 😅

Then some whole star anise, also pretty old but not too stale I don't think. Snapped them up into chunks and then put a bunch in each bottle. Like, enough to fill the centre of my cupped palm? Enough that you could pile into a single layer on a teaspoon? That much, more or less, per bottle.

Then cloves. Either 2 cloves per bottle if the clove was big & still had that little ball attached to the end, or 3 if it didn't and they were small cloves

Then some mace because I found it with the rest of my spices and had forgotten that I had it. Put, like, a thumbnail sized bit in each bottle.

Then a whole nutmeg which I crushed into big fragments and divided between the bottles

Then cubeb into the 'ginger' bottle and the 'ginger+chilli' bottle. I think like 3 seeds in the former and 4 or 5 in the latter?

Then red Sichuan into the 'chilli' bottle. Like 3 or 4 seeds?

And then a dried chili into the 'chilli' bottle. Idk which kind of chilli it is. It was red and the broken chunk I picked out of the package was about the size of my pinky finger (but the entire chilli would have been bigger than that). Still had its seeds inside.

Do your own spices however your heart desires, using up whatever you have at hand.

Then the wet ingredients:

Pineapple and water is all you actually need, but I was in the mood for experimenting so here's what I did

Zested a navel orange. One third of it into each of the 'orange', 'orange + ginger', 'orange + ginger + chilli' bottles.

Then fresh ginger into the relevant bottles. About the size of two bottlecaps worth for each bottle? Maybe a bit less? Sliced into thick chucks, which I scored and then crushed with the flat of the knife before dropping them in.

Then the star of the show: the pineapple!

Cut the whole thing into quarters so the amount per bottle would be measured out ahead of time

Working one bottle at a time, I further quartered the allocated quarter-pineapple, to make it easier to handle;

Sliced off the rind and the core, and put them into the bottles, first slicing the rind into strips (else it wouldn't fit through the narrow mouthes of the bottles!)

(Keeping the main of the flesh to eat on its own, of course (I have chemical burns on my tongue and the roof of my mouth from eating so much but it's just so good! ☠️))

(If you don't wanna eat that much pineapple, just chuck it in the tepache; it'll make it even better. Prolly good to slice it up or gently crush it or etc so that the juices can be more easily released from the flesh & into the tepache)

Then when all the bottles have their pineapple, you add the water! Filled up to the shoulder where the bottle begins narrowing; about 1L total I guess? Gotta leave some head space for the fermentation!

(And while you're filling, rinse off all the sticky juice from the outside of the bottle and its cap...)

Then put the cap on tight and invert the bottle and give it a good shakey-shake to get as much of the settled sugar dissolved as possible, and to get all the spices and plant materials and yeasts introduced to each other.

Then you switch the cap for a DIY MacGyver airlock so the bottle doesn't explode and make a giant mess of your kitchen. You make this using a balloon, a spare bottlecap, and a push pin; plus you will need a spare empty bottle to use as a handle during assembly (otherwise it's obnoxiously fiddly to do OR you squirt tepache all over yourself OR both) and it is assembled thus:

Stab some holes in the bottlecap

Rinse out the balloons with water just in case there's any schmutz in there

Poke holes in the balloons. Taking a deflated balloon I pushed a pin through it thrice, so there were six holes in it in total. That seems like a good amount to me but I'm just guessing.

Put the bottlecap on the spare bottle

Stretch the neck of the balloon over the bottlecap. You want to get it on there enough so that it won't simply pop off the bottle once the fermentation gets going.

Then you roll the mouth of the balloon back enough so that you can freely unscrew the bottle cap and transfer it to your bottle of tepache. (And then roll it back down onto the tepache bottle for a secure fit)

When the tepache is fermenting, its gases will inflate the balloon and it will look like this:

This setup is cheap, simple, and effective.

Releases the gas out while disallowing bugs in, and its easy to put on and off the bottle, and if the bottle overflows only a little bit then the mess will be mostly contained inside the balloon (unless it isn't), and finally it looks really cool because you can SEE how much fermentation is going on. (All you have to do is make a poster about it and that's an entire school science project right there, I tell you hwat.)

Then you just put the tepache somewhere dim to ferment. I always put 'em in a tray or something just in case the fermentation gets too enthusiastic for the perforated balloons to release and they overflow:

This is only a temporary home until I find a better one because bookshelf-with-electronics is not a happy place for very sticky fermenting liquids to reside, but anyway the colour coding here is:

Yellow = pineapple

Orange = pineapple + orange

Pink = pineapple + orange + ginger

Red = pineapple + orange + ginger + chilli

After 3 or 4 days of fermentation, you switch the lids from Ghetto Airlock Lid to Regular Airtight Lid, and give them another couple of days of secondary fermentation to carbonate the beverage, and then you put them in the fridge to slow the fermentation way down so they don't explode before you can drink them (and so the yeast doesn't eat ALL the sugar)

(OBVIOUSLY if the bottle looks dangerously pressurised and explody, then just pop the top every now and again to let the excess gas out! It's not hard!)

(It's not a dangerous hazard if you don't, cuz these are only plastic bottles after all, but it will make a giant sticky mess and you'll have much less delicious tepache to drink.

I really hate adding brain-dead caveats like these but if I don't then people will fall over themselves to "um, actually" at me, which is even worse 😒)

If you give the yeast loads of sugar and loads of fermentation, you'll get an alcoholic tepache.

If you don't give it loads of sugar but do give it loads of fermentation, you'll get a pickled pineapple vinegar (with or without the addition of whichever spices you felt like flavouring it with).

Both options are yummy in their own way, but regular, sweet, non-alcoholic tepache is the main goal here.

After you've drank a bottle of tepache, you can refill it with water and sugar and give it another round of fermentation for a second batch. To facilitate this, you'll wanna hold a strainer over the mouth of the bottle when you're pouring from it, to keep all the solid plant matter in the bottle and out of your glass (which you kinda wanna do anyway because obviously it ain't so nice to have all that schmutz in your glass regardless of your re-fermentating intentions)