Advice please; Kefir Grains. Is it possible to rinse clean the dairy milk grains...to be able to re-use them with Ewe's milk instead??

[Poppy_the_cat]

I have tried to search on the internet, but cannot find the answer.

Having just recently bought these dairy grains, I didn't really want to have to buy some more...

Is it possible to clean them up? ...To get rid of the cow dairy microbes from them in order to make Ewe's milk kefir instead??

Any advice very much welcomed.

Thank you.

Poppy

[Angel_of_the_North]

Although they seem to prefer staying with the same type of milk, you can just change the milk without doing anything special. You can't easily change from water kefir to milk kefir though. I've had to use cow milk occasionally and it doesn't seem to do the grains any harm. The only time you really need to rinse the grains is if they get a hard yellow crust on them - then you need a rinse and gentle massage. This is from more than 10 years of making the stuff. I don't think they retain "microbes" from the milk; they eat it.

[humanbean]

Yes.

yemoos.com/pages/milk-kefir...

I did read somewhere that rinsing of grains should be done with filtered water not plain tap water.

[Angel_of_the_North in reply to humanbean]

Doesn't seem to make any difference in practice. I very much doubt you could rinse away every trace of what the kefir was grown in. The other option would be to sell these grains on ebay (or give them away) and buy new ones grown in the type of milk you want to use. Water kefir grains never seem to work right with milk BTW, so don't get those to use with milk. Since kefir has become more mainstream, there's an awful lot of woo-woo talked about it, perhaps to make it seem more like a black art than it actually is.

[Hay2016]

Hiya. Did you come right in the end with your milk kefir?? Thinking of branching out but some online reviews put me of sourcing grains. Could you PM where you got yours from for me please.

Hayley and your progeny of water grains who are awesome!!!

[Poppy_the_cat in reply to Hay2016]

Dear Hayley,

I am sticking to our water kefir. I read that unpasteurised milk kefir was okay ....but I tried it and it's taken me two months to get over it and I'm not quite right yet. I can't even use Ewe's milk as was suggested by a Nutritionist.

I still make it for my brother and he loves it. Would you like some of mine?

Just let me know.

Poppy 😉