Sure, All the Healthy Beverages

I am the healthy beverages guru.

As I write this, I just finished my home-brewed ginger water kefir, and am staring down a tall glass of raw paleo chocolate milk from my grass-fed cow.

Left, raw paleo chocolate milk. Right, my empty ginger water kefir cup.

Today, I have also consumed a raw milk kefir smoothie (with banana and cinnamon - YUM!). I also have had glasses of cherry kombucha, strawberry and mixed berry water kefir (made with organic sugar), more raw chocolate milk, coffee (black, with only some Bridget cream added), and some plain ol' filtered water.

It all started when I got a cow. It'll be fun, I said.  :)




It feels like a very gradual shift, but I suppose in reality, it's been a rapid turnaround. First, we got the cow, and started scooping cream and making chocolate milk. Then we got our kefir grains. They took a while to grow out, especially the milk ones, but over a few weeks, we went from barely having a tablespoon of kefir grains to over a half gallon of grain. Yeah - HALF of the 1.5 gallon kefir jar ended up as grains. Crazytown.

We ran out fridge space for a bit there. It was glass jars of various colored liquids everywhere.

So, I did what any man would do - I started drinking.

First, it was doubling and tripling up on chocolate milk. Then we ran out of honey for a bit, so I took to the kefir as a filler. Within days, I was easily topping 32 ounces.

Then there's the kombucha. Wife brews a gallon or so at a time. It escalated from there.

In addition to the fridge full of jars, we have another 10 jars doing their double-ferment on the counter right now.

I have no idea which is kombucha and which is kefir.
Either way, I drink about 2 jars a day.

I like it.

I'm getting probiotics and healthy gut flora out the yin yang. I feel no guilt drinking tasty stuff, and feel no icky effects (like that weird diet soda film on your teeth, or the even more weird sugar soda film on your teeth). It quenches my thirst. It gives me a buzz every now and again.

Occasionally, we just have too much. Rather than letting it go to waste, flushing it, running it down the drain, or what have you, we feed it to the pigs. Wife and I were joking the other day that all of the extra milk kefir we had just fed to the pigs probably would sell for $25 retail. It was a lot of organic grass-fed unpasteurized non-homogenized raw Jersey cow milk kefir.

And now it's time to top off my chocolate milk!