Milk Kefir and Milk Kefir Grains, an introduction to an incredible probiotic
Quick summary : Milk Kefir Grains (MKG) are a Symbiotic Colony Of Bacteria and Yeasts (SCOBY), they can apparently reproduce forever in a well maintain glass jar, when they reproduce, they also produce an excellent kefir yogurt just called milk kefir or just kefir! Kefir is an excellent probiotic holding dozens of different strains of microorganisms crowding in huge numbers for each cup of ripe kefir, my guess (*1) is a dimensional order around one trillion (1012) microorganisms (a Tera MO 😃) per cup of kefir.
I love this food, it changed my life and I think it can change the life of many other people, but many psychological and standard factors of the modern life transform the simple thing of dealing with milk kefir grains into a real tough challenge, what are they ?
- Proximity of chemicals like detergents, possible presence of antibiotics into the milk etc. Are a death sentence for the grains.
- Beware of the obsession about rinsing/cleaning the grains! If I rinse my grains once with the same milk I used to brew them, a by product I am drinking with the milk kefir altogether, it’s not because the kefir grains are dirty, it’s to help the MO from the kefir grains to compete against the MO that are free inside the milk mixture attached to the kefir grains it helps to make a kefir mainly from kefir grains and less from old milk kefir hanging around the grains, and in short it help to keep the MO colonizing the milk as complete as possible. In the reverse situation if we made kefir yogurt only form a previous kefir yogurt the MO diversity degenerate and at the end we’ll get only one or two strains like with most industrial yogurts that by the way use strains that strive at high temperatures.
- Never never rinse the grains with chlorinated water, chlorine is made to kill MO and it will do just that with the MO of kefir! But what about us for our gut flora when we drink chlorinated water? First it’s well know that it’s good to let the water rest so the chlorine can evaporate, and secondly when we drink it, it’s mixed with many other things before getting inside the small and large intestines so a lot of the chlorine is gone and the final result is not too bad, better anyway than to drink contaminated water. By the way kefir grains cope very well if we never rinse them, the final kefir is just going to brew faster and to be a bit less diverse in MO strains.
- You do not need a fridge for brewing kefir ! We are so used to fridges that we tend to store everything into them, but kefir need to be brewed at room temperature and it’s only when we want to slow down the fermentation that we can use the fridge knowing by the way that kefir grains do not like it and still need some food (milk) to «chew» on while resting inside a fridge, so the key word here is moderation ! Kefir grains are not extremophiles the don’t like it too cold or too warm, finally like us!
- Because it takes skills to brew it efficiently, not really manipulation skills but understanding of how good MO work together, and at the same time almost everybody knows how bad a rotten milk can smell after being left at room temperature with random MO to take care of it ! So there is some trust to be learned with the kefir grains.
- It’s almost free, so expensive random like studies are not done with them because a company doing that and proving their efficiency with official protocols would not make any money from them, so with the actual socioeconomical system we won’t have such studies done, even if it is probably (personal advice) the most efficient probiotic we can find. Quite a shame actually, because if we had a socioeconomical environment that could be completely disconnected from corporate profit and fully connected with population well-being, it would probably be possible to improve/study scientifically kefir grains to have strains especially adapted for particular situation and to have these specific MO taken a bit more seriously.
- I saw the effect on myself after an antibiotic therapy.
- The origin of kefir grains before domestication, in other words Wild Milk Kefir Grains (WMKG) come from mammals (sheep, goats, etc.) which is not the case with Kombucha and Water Kefir Grains (WKG), WKG on the other side if we trust a few relevant sources stating that it comes from the plant realms (cactus to be precise), so it seems logical that microorganisms from mammals kefir grains are more compatible with us than the microorganisms from plant based kefir grains.
- Wild Milk Kefir Grains on top of coming from domesticated mammals have probably been humanized with millenniums of human interactions, so they well may be close to what could be the most perfect comestible SCOBY.
- It can improve other foods, making them more digestible.
- It can increase drastically how long we can keep food at room temperature or inside a normal fridge.
- Kefir grains can ferment other mediums like vegetarian milks and when trained well enough they can even multiply themselves in these new mixtures! Still it must be something having like milk proteins and fat, so just fruit juice won’t work for the long term well being of milk kefir grains, but that paradigm is OK for a few batches, because the milk kefir MO can process simple sugars very efficiently like most MO.
- We can use it to make some bread.
- It’s very agreeable as an after shave cream.
- It can also help to keep the skin healthy and even sometimes the female private parts when they have been disturbed by antibiotics.
- And last but not least, it can fully rebalance the gut flora after disturbances like after some antibiotic treatments, I had an exceptional personal experience about that.
- MKG can evolve depending how we manage them, for example larger grains can be selected, or grain that tend to stick more together.
- When they are neglected they protect themselves by becoming smoother, so having less contact with their surrounding environment, if it keeps going for too long they die, so smooth kefir grain can also be seen like old kefir grains, but they can also regenerate (see below).
- Old very smooth kefir grain in many cases can regenerate themselves if conditions become better, so normal cauliflower structure will pop out of the smooth grains.
- Their long sturdy life, basically forever if they are well cared after means they are able to rid themselves of many bad microorganisms, which is very reassuring.
(*1) Not many sound scientific studies are efficiently done and published on that topic because there isn’t much profit to be made : no patents are possible because it exists from millenniums, it’s impossible to sell it at an expensive price because at the end it’s just some sort of super yogurt easy to make at home, etc. So the main benefit is for the people using it, which is a nice change 😁. But why is the specific number of MO / cup is difficult to know ? It depends on how long it was brewed and at what temperature, also keep in mind that thew longest is not always the best, because when the kefir become too sour, some MO may become weak or die etc. And to make things more complicated MO are difficult to count inside a medium like milk because it holds many different micro parts from the cow «herself», like rest of cells, large lumps of proteins etc. So the MO inside a micro-drop of milk kefir are difficult to count (of course if we van count exactly how many MO are present in a very well known small quantity it becomes easy to have an approximation for eatable portion). Difficult to count … it’s of course completely different with some other SCOBY products like kombucha and simple sugar kefir (also called water kefir, tibicos etc.), because their medium is very homogeneous and transparent any good optical microscope allow to count them and we can see balls and rods like shaped microorganisms (actually mainly bacteria) hanging free or grouped around larger shapes that are likely to be some of the yeasts parts ! Yeasts tightly grouped together are mainly making the matrix of the grains or the sheets visible for the kombucha SCOBY ! A logical macroscopic extrapolation because yeast are more complex than bacteria, they can reproduce by meiosis like us (we can even say that they have a sexuality, for example microscopic yeasts are related to macroscopic mushrooms that reproduce between individuals with billions spores dropped in the wind). So we are now on the topic of an eventual sexuality of milk kefir grains or more generally any SCOBY (by the way kefir is excellent for human sexuality because it tends to improve the general health, so don’t be surprised if you get horny 🌹 after getting into kefir brewing 😃). So even if a batch of milk kefir can manage well alone in a jar for many years or centuries if well cared for, it may be a good thing to try every X years or so to mix it with a batch from another kefir source, that external kefir need of course to be chosen carefully and tested separately for a few batches before trying to mix it with your long term habitual kefir grains, in other words you need to find a safe «kefir thoroughbred» somewhere among friends or strangers.
Acronyms :- MO : microorganisms.
- MKG : Milk Kefir Grains.
- WMKG : Wild Milk Kefir Grains.
- WKG : Water (simple sugary water, fruit) Kefir Grains
- MKMO : Milk Kefir microorganisms.
- SCOBY : Symbiotic Colony Of Bacteria and Yeasts.