If you make your own kefir at home, please read this!

Working with live cultures can be a wonderful boon to health. You can buy ready-to-drink goat’s milk kefir, or you can make your own at home. Like anything, this has both benefits and potential risks! And often when you order grains online, these risks are frequently not discussed in the literature that accompanies the grains.

In order to make sure that your home-made kefir is safe and immaculate, please observe the following food safety precautions:

Food safety precautions for homemade kefir

Ferment your kefir until the pH is below 3.7. This is the level at which most bacterial pathogens are unable to survive. pH meters are readily available online, and they are not prohibitively expensive. Your kefir should be dropping in pH rapidly enough that it is below 5.0 at 18 hours; this precludes the development of spoilage bacteria.
Test your finished kefir once a month at a public health laboratory near you, to ensure that you are not re-using grains that have become contaminated. Anytime you re-use a live culture (such as kefir grains), you run the risk of bacteriophage contamination. Bacteriophages, or “phages,” as they are known, are viruses that infect bacteria. They are found in ecosystems where bacteria are commonly found, including man-made ecological niches such as food fermentation vats or jars. Bacteriophages can turn harmless bacteria into agents of disease, by transferring to them genes that produce toxic substances. These bacteria are then able to infect humans and cause food poisoning and other potentially deadly diseases. At Chuckling Goat, we have our kefir regularly tested by a microbiology lab to ensure that it is free from any phage or pathogen infection. I recommend that anyone making kefir at home do the same! Otherwise, you run the risk of a phage infection getting into your grains, which if you continue to use, will propagate the phage contamination. As you cannot sterilise the grains themselves, this is quite a risk for the home user who does not test their kefir for purity. If you contact the public health laboratory near you, they can explain how you can bring your kefir in for testing. Ask for a standard microbiological food safety screen for a live culture product. They may never have heard of kefir! ; )
Please note that what you see in this blog and on the Chuckling Goat website comes from Chuckling Goat kefir, which we make on the farm, and is not necessarily representative of any other kefir. Kefir grains are living organisms with unique bio-profiles, and they are not all guaranteed to be the same. Our own kefir grains have been DNA-strained and trialled for efficacy by Aberystwyth University. I can not speak for the efficacy of any other kefir, made with other grains.

Want homemade kefir without the hassle?

Chuckling Goat Kefir is homemade style! Our kefir is still made with live kefir grains and stirred by hand, exactly the same way I first made it in the farmhouse. Every batch of our kefir is rigorously microbiologically tested at a Public Health Food Safety Laboratory. We do not ship our Kefir until we have those results in our hands. We also have 100% traceability inside our system, so you can be absolutely assured that every bottle of our Kefir is 100% pure, completely safe, and naturally powerful!

To learn more, check out A beginner’s guide to fermented foods and What’s all the fuss about fermented foods?. Kefir pairs beautifully with the Complete Prebiotic – ferment’s best friend.

Any questions? Contact one of our Nutritional Therapists via live chat, weekdays from 8 am to 8 pm.