Pan @Filek, a few years ago I used to see interesting product in Estonian groceries - dried coal-black flat rye bread for kvass making, sold in paper bags with traditional Estonian kvass recipe printed on them. Haven’t seen it for a while, though… I’ll look for it next week and tell you more, if I find it.
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how that Kvass tastes? As I understood its like unhopped beer with faily low alcohol content. For me as for Czech its absolutely unknown drink and always thought its something clody and somehow unpleasant. Jack
Most modern kvasses are non-alcoholic and artificially carbonated refreshment drinks with sugar, though there are some low-alco kvasses as well. Despite low natural alcohol content (EDIT: up to 1.2%), the latter are categorized as non-alcoholic beverages.
Although most kvasses are made by breweries, taste-wise they differ from beer (even the non-alko one) greatly.
Proper kvass is made of water, sugar, dried rye bread or malt with a very small amount of food acid (milk, lactic or ascorbic). Superior product contains only natural CO2, but some artificially carbonated kvasses are quite nice, too. Good kvass tastes quite like rye bread soup (crumbled Baltic rye bread with cold water and some sugar; imagine it carbonated, filtered and bottled). Some kvasses may contain yeast.
I was treated with a home brewed kvass once. It contained a fair amount of alcohol (up to 5%), but I found it tasting somewhat nauseous (due to the yeast) and lacking in natural CO2. I don’t drink alcohol anymore, so I prefer non-alkoholic kvass. But even when I still was a drinker, I found the non-alko kvass tasting much better.
Panie @volunge, if you’ll find that recipe, you can post it here. I didn’t now that Estonians are also into kvass so it will be a nice addition to the topic.
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