New to Kefir and so far, the learning curve is steep.
I like making Kefir because it's like owning a pet without having to clean up after it and it doesn't wake you up in the middle of the night.
I'm on my second set of kefir grains because I think I killed the first batch and now I think I killed the second batch.
It's winter. I've had difficulty getting the house temp up to 70 degrees, so I had been rehydrating the grains at about 66-67 degrees on the countertop, changing the milk every 24 hours. Nothing much seemed to be happening at all, for about a week. There were a few batches of curds and thickened milk, a few good batches of Kefir milk. I couldn't figure out what were curds and what were Kefir grains, so I rinsed the Kefir grains under spring water (no chlorine) and they quit growing at all. I think I shocked them. After that, I still kept putting them in 16 oz of milk, changing the milk every day and setting the jar on the kitchen counter to do its thing. There was a little life left in them as they started to perk up a bit after about a week, but not much.
Finally I decided it was too cold in the house, so I tried to keep the Kefir in a makeshift warmer environment. I strained the grains (which at that time, still looked like little yellow pencil erasers) and put them in 16 oz of whole milk in a Mason jar, then put the Mason jar in a water bath in a giant Pyrex bowl filled with water, then put the Pyrex bowl in a crockpot filled with water, set on "WARM". In about 12 hours, the milk became curds and whey. Yes, they were definitely alive, at least they WERE alive (because I had curds and whey again), until the temperature got too hot and I cooked them.
I strained the curds and whey through a steel mesh strainer and stirred the curds to separate out the Kefir grains, but now my Kefir had become a mushy mess and it was much smaller. There were no big granules anymore. Luckily, I salvaged the cheesy stuff but threw the whey out. Undeterred, I tried again with what was left, but this time, I bought a candy thermometer. Again, I filled the Pyrex jar full of water, filled the Mason jar with the Kefir and 16 oz of whole milk, placed the Mason jar in the Pyrex bowl, but this time I placed the Pyrex bowl on a heating pad set on low and put the thermometer in the water bath. The thermometer showed that the water bath was too cold and I was worried about starting a fire if I raised the heating pad up to medium and left the house. So I put away the heating pad and threw out the what was left of the (probably dead) Kefir. What was left in the strainer was a small amount of a substance that was unrecognizable as Kefir. It looked like sandy ricotta cheese.
I bought a new batch of Kefir. We are now in an unseasonable heat wave. I have been able to keep the temperature in the house at about 69 degrees during the day and the Kefir was doing OK rehydrating, but not much was happening for the first week. After the first week, it was definitely alive but struggling. The ambient temperature outside has been going down into the 20's at night and it gets pretty cold inside too, so last night I decided that instead of using a tall Mason jar, I would put the Kefir and milk in a short, wide Pyrex glass bowl and put the bowl in my electric yogurt maker with the lid of the yogurt maker on in order to maintain the temperature. Well, guess what? That's too hot, too.
When I strained the Kefir this morning, I saw that I was back to the whey and mushy mess in the strainer that almost all goes through the strainer when I mix it around. Nothing looking like cauliflower or pencil erasers. It looks like ricotta cheese. The last straw was that the two "good" batches from last week, my "successes" that I put in the fridge with a vanilla bean I got from Tahiti----I tasted it and it was HORRIBLE. It tasted like a really pungent, sour, vanilla flavored effervescent alcohol, nothing like the good tasting Kefir milk I get at the grocery store. I saw from a posting on your site that said Kefir can turn into alcohol. I knew it could produce a small amount of carbon dioxide and alcohol, but this stuff was just awful.
So what's the deal with the temperature? I'm going to name my pet Kefir "Goldilocks" because the temperature is always either too cold or too hot and it's never just right. How can I maintain the temperature in the winter?
Can I just let it sit out for 48 hours at 66 degrees?
How do I strain the Kefir gently? I seem to be brutalizing it into a mush with my little rubber spatula and my stainless steel sieve. I've even tried flipping the Kefir granules into the air and catching it with the sieve so as not to destroy it with the spatula. Still, it looks like ricotta cheese when I'm done with it, but that could be because I let it get too hot.
Even when the Kefir is working, the milk never really thickens. It just goes straight from thin milk to curds and whey. Plus, it's super sour and disgusting tasting, not sweet at all. My homemade plain unsweetened yogurt tastes naturally sweet. What am I doing wrong with the Kefir? And yes, I've read the forums (yours and others) and watched several videos on YouTube and at other websites. I know it's supposed to taste sweet and a little sour and it's just supposed to be so easy to make. Change the milk every 24 hours and let it sit at room temperature. How hard can that be? The videos never show what a failure looks like or how to recover from a failure or how to know if you've killed your Kefir or if you've got temperature problems. I'm not seeing any threads between the grains, just mush. Should I just give up with the countertop culturing and make the week-long refrigerator Kefir or is there something on the market to maintain the temperature of the milk for Kefir culturing?
Thanks for any help.