Beets, salt, water, a jar on the counter for five days. The colour is a beautiful deep ruby and the smell is earthy and sour and fine, but when I pour it, it comes out thick and stringy. It trails off the spoon.
I grated the beets this time instead of cubing them, and the kitchen has been warm. No fuzz, nothing coloured growing on top. Is this recoverable or do I start again?
Grating is most of it and the warmth is the rest. Ropiness comes from bacteria producing thick stringy compounds while they work through sugars, and grated beet releases far more sugar far faster than cubes do, so you handed them a lot to work with in a warm room.
Some recipes warn about grated beet for exactly this reason, and for pushing the alcohol and off-flavours up too. Cube them next time, it genuinely changes the batch.
Is five days also too long, or is that normal for kvass?
Five days is reasonable in a cool kitchen and long in a warm one, which is the useful way to think about every one of these. Taste daily rather than counting days, and refrigerate when you like it. A young ferment is also more prone to ropiness before the microbes settle out.
Same thing happens in kombucha, water kefir, tepache, cider and wine. It is not a kvass fault.
The bin list, since slime by itself is not it: fuzzy mould on the surface or on the beets, anything pink or black or otherwise colourful, a smell that is rotten or putrid rather than earthy and sour, or beets gone soft and mushy and smelling bad.
You have ruby colour and an earthy sour smell, so this is texture. For reference, good kvass should be salty, earthy, slightly sour and clean. Sweet, flat and slimy is the combination that means start again.
@weight_on_top · 2w ago
Two other prevention items. Enough salt, following a recipe you trust rather than eyeballing it, because thin brine makes this more likely. And a weight to keep the beets properly under the liquid, since anything sitting above the brine is where trouble starts.
On your actual batch: give it a gentle stir, move it somewhere cooler and taste it in two days. Ropiness does sometimes break down. If it is still trailing off the spoon, it is a fresh batch.
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