How it is brewed
Five bands. Agnese asked for six.
Rye baked on Friday and dried over the weekend, steeped on Monday, fermented for thirty-six hours at 18 to 20 °C, chilled to 3 °C. Here is each step, and why none of them can be skipped.
Baked Fridays · dried until nearly black
The bread
Every Friday the deck oven gets the rye. The loaves come out dark, rest overnight in the cold room, and then they are sliced and laid out to dry until they are nearly black, which is the colour that matters. Pale bread makes a thin kvass, sweet for a moment and then nothing, like tea made with one leaf. The crust is where the flavour lives: the darker it goes, the more of that roasted, faintly bitter rye comes through, and the colour of the drink in the glass is decided before the water ever touches the bread. I learned this the slow way. For two months in 2022 I baked loaves that looked lovely on a shelf and made kvass the colour of weak beer, and I blamed everything else in turn: the starter, the water, the weather, the fermenter, once even the jug. My grandmother's oven in Kuldīga had a door that never quite shut and a corner at the back where loaves always caught, and she gave those burnt ones to my grandfather for his kvass because nobody wanted to eat them. She would put them on the windowsill to dry and the kitchen smelled of them for days, and if you asked for one she would tell you they were not for you, they were for the jar. I thought she was just being careful with bread. The deck oven does not have a bad corner, so now I make one on purpose: the last stretch of the bake runs longer than any baker would allow, and the crust comes out the colour of strong coffee. Then it dries over the weekend, and on Monday it goes in the water.
Age: older than the company
The starter
The starter is the same one I kept in my kitchen. I began it with rye flour, water and a jar with a chipped lid, and by the time Kvoaza opened in spring 2022 it was six years old and the most reliable thing I owned.
It is fed twice a day, every day, with rye flour and water. On Mondays a share of it goes into the fermenters and the rest is fed again and left to rise. When we close for the holidays it goes into the cold room, where it slows down and waits for me.
It is ten years old now. Every bottle we have sold has a little of that first jar in it.
- Started
- Six years before Kvoaza, in a kitchen jar
- Fed
- Twice a day, every day
- Diet
- Rye flour and water
- Holidays
- The cold room, slowed right down
Thirty-six hours
Monday is brew day and the door stays shut, because most of what follows cannot be interrupted for a delivery.
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Hour -4
Steep the bread
The dried rye goes into hot water and stays there until the water has taken the colour of the crust. This is where the dark comes from.
-
Hour -1
Cool it down
The liquid is drawn off the bread and brought down to fermenting temperature. Too warm and the starter races. Too cold and it sulks.
-
Hour 00
Pitch the starter
A measure of the rye starter goes in with the sugar. The sugar is not there for sweetness. It is what the yeast eats.
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Hours 00-36
Ferment at 18-20 °C
Thirty-six hours at 18 to 20 °C in the two 600-litre fermenters. We taste it at twelve hours and again at twenty-four, and change nothing unless something is wrong.
-
Hour 36
Chill to 3 °C
Cold stops it where we want it: a little sour, a little sweet, and barely alcoholic.
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Before bottling
Measure and label
Every batch is measured for alcohol before it goes into a keg or a bottle. It typically reads 0.5% to 0.9%, and that figure is printed on the label.
Two fermenters make about 1,200 litres a week. In a hot July that is not always enough, and new accounts may wait a week.
Cold, and kept cold
We do not pasteurise. Heating kvass after fermentation stops the yeast, flattens the rye and turns it into something that keeps for a year and tastes as if it has. Ours is still alive when it arrives, which is why it has to stay between 2 and 6 °C from our cold room to your glass.
- Bottles, kept cold
- 21 days
- Keg, sealed
- 30 days
- Keg, once tapped
- 10 days
- Always
- 2-6 °C
Behind the counter
A keg left beside a warm coffee machine goes sour days early. If you take two kegs a week on a standing order, we lend you a countertop single-tap cooler for nothing, so the last glass from a keg tastes like the first. For everyone else: the fridge, at the back, not in the door.
What we will not do to it
No sweeteners.
The sugar is what the yeast eats. A sugar-free kvass is not a kvass.
No pasteurising.
No shelf-stable version, no cans, nothing heated after it has fermented.
No added alcohol.
Nothing beyond the 0.5% to 0.9% that fermentation leaves behind. No hard kvass, at any strength.
No private label.
It is made here, by us, and it goes out under our name or not at all.