Well it's been a while since I last posted because I've been sick since mid October! One sinus infection after another which led to my having sinus surgery to remove polyps and impacted build up in my right maxillary sinus. This was done on the 29th of December and when I went back to work the following week I promptly caught the flu. I'm still not up to snuff today so I'll keep this brief. I wanted to share with you an update on my water kefir endevors. I've had a love hate relationship with the stuff. I love it when it works out but hate it when it does not work. I find it finicky to get the sugar level just right so it does not raise my blood sugar too much and getting the grains to replicate has been very hard as well. Then there are the explosions. Yep, explosions. The first one happened at night about 2 weeks into my experimentation. A bottle left out for a 2nd ferment exploded at 2 in the morning, frightening the family ( yet somehow I was the only one to get up and see what happened) and the cats, sending glass and elderberry all over the floor. About a month after that I had a hibiscus batch fermenting and it exploded while Kevin was cooking. Luckily he was not hurt. Then I had the surgery. I put a bottle in the fridge the week before after it had fermented ( I had figured out to only let them ferment for about 12 hours before chilling them to drink) and promptly forgot about it. The surgery came and went, then the flu came and stayed. Yesterday I was laying on the couch coughing and I heard what sounded like the cats knocking a cast iron pot off the counter. Then I remembered that we didn't have any cast iron pots. I went into the kitchen to investigate. Seeing nothing amiss in the kitchen I thought I'd better check the fridge. This is what I found.
That forgotten bottle exploded in the fridge with enough force to break the top shelf in the fridge! ( The bottle was on the door next to the cream) Everything on the top shelf crashed onto the next shelf down in a hail of busted glass and eldeberries. If you look closely you can see the dent in the back of the fridge caused by the flying bottletop. Thank the Gods, Goddesses and all the pretty little ponies that bottle was in the fridge! if it had been on the counter one of the cats or humans in the house could have been killed. I also learned that replacement shelves for 14 yr old fridges are very hard to find and stupid expensive. Thus endeth my experimentation with water kefir!