Kvass, the history of the Russian drink and how to make it at home

A beverage shelf in a supermarket somewhere near Boston. Kombucha in glass. Ginger ale. Between them, a dark plastic bottle with "kvass drink" on the label. A shopper picks it up, reads the ingredients, and gets to the word "bread." Puts it back. Bread in a beverage is baffling to him.

The drink in this bottle is a thousand years old. Russians turned its name into a curse word and still use it to this day. Gogol slipped it to the reader disguised as cabbage soup. And then kvass crossed the ocean with its families and ended up next to kombucha, and no one on that shelf knows what it is.

A drink older than Moscow

Kyiv, 996. Prince Vladimir consecrates the Church of the Tithes and orders food, mead, and kvass to be distributed around the city. This is recorded in the Tale of Bygone Years. The chronicler does not explain what kvass is. It never even crosses his mind. Moscow does not yet exist; it will be a century and a half before its first mention. Yet kvass is already present in the chronicle as a matter of course, just like water.

He was water. Or rather, a replacement for it. The city well could fail, but the fermented bread drink did not spoil for weeks. It was drunk every day and went unnoticed. In the sixteenth-century «Domostroy,» it is listed among the supplies that a master of the house is obliged to keep, between salted meat and cabbage. The entire history of kvass by dates, from chronicles to plastic bottles, is gathered on the timeline below. One thing is important here. Before Vyazemsky, the word «kvass» meant a drink and nothing more.

How kvass became a curse word

Paris, 1827. Pyotr Vyazemsky is writing letters home to the Moscow Telegraph magazine. He signs them not with his own name, but uses the initials of his friend, Grigory Rimsky-Korsakov, so that Moscow readers would guess who this clever person is. In one of his letters, he recalls a French witticism and refers to Turgot. The latter called blind praise of everything of one's own *patriotisme d’antichambre*, an antechamber patriotism. Lackey patriotism. Vyazemsky translates it into Russian daily life. Here, he writes, it could be called kvass patriotism.

Two words. He dropped them casually, in the middle of a conversation about French books. Afterwards, for the rest of his life, he made sure they weren't attributed to anyone else. In his collected works, he added a footnote: here, he said, this playful definition appeared for the first time. The magazine's readers actually considered the editor Polevoy to be the author of the joke.

Why kvass? Kvass in 1827 is sold on every corner. A kvass vendor stands by the market with a small barrel and a mug. He has pear, mint, with raisins, with horseradish. Only river water is cheaper. You couldn't explain that to a Parisian, but a Muscoviter doesn't need it explained. To attach kvass to the word «patriotism» meant to say: love your homeland the way you drink kvass, without thinking or analyzing the taste.

The word caught on for good. It has been repeated for almost two hundred years. Those who repeat it do not remember the drink. Kvass has nothing to do with it. The mockery came from the outside. That is how it goes with very simple things; they are easy to turn into labels.

Fifteen years later, kvass reached Gogol. The first chapter of Dead Souls, 1842. Chichikov arrived in the provincial town, walked around, read a playbill, and returned to the inn. Next is a quote: «The day, it seems, was concluded with a portion of cold veal, a bottle of sour shchi, and a sound sleep to the fullest pump-handle twist, as they express it in some parts of the vast Russian state.».

With a bottle of shchi. Today, the reader sees the word «shchi» and pictures cabbage in a bowl. Gogol had no such thing in mind. In his time, "sour shchi" referred to a beverage. A rye-based drink, similar to kvass, only more heavily carbonated. It was kept in bottles under cork and opened with a pop. Cheap tavern champagne. Chichikov did not eat soup before bed. He drank a bottle of the effervescent drink and went to sleep. Shchi as a soup is a separate topic.

So in Russian classics, kvass appears twice, and both times under a pseudonym. Once as a mockery, the second time as a trap for the reader. Meanwhile, the kvass itself sits quietly in the tub and ferments.

How to make kvass at home

Now comes the tub. In America, it turns into a three-liter glass jar from a Russian store, and the main difficulty begins before the jar.

Bread. The rye bread from a regular supermarket is light, half-wheat, with caraway seeds. Kvass made from it turns out pale, like tea from a tea bag used for the third time. You need dark. Dense, sour, on sourdough. Borodinsky or its relatives. People go to a Russian store for it; on maps, such places are labeled Russian grocery or European deli. The bread is by the cash register. Nearby on the shelf are bags of rye malt and jars of kvass wort concentrate; with them, even the first batch of kvass turns out dark. If there is no Russian store, people look for a German or Polish bakery. Pumpernickel from Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s will do; it bears little resemblance to Borodinsky, but it will work for a jar. Rye malt is sold by home-brewing supply stores, where it is called rye malt. What to buy and where, by city, is compiled in the cards below.

It is simple after that. Cut the bread and dry it in the oven until it becomes dark croutons. Not black, black ones will make it bitter. Put the croutons in a jar. Boiling water on top. Sugar. Wait until you can keep your finger in the liquid. Then a handful of raisins. Unwashed. Wild yeast lives on the skin of the raisins, washing them will kill them, and the jar will stay dead for a week. For reliability, a pinch of dry yeast nearby. Cheesecloth instead of a lid. In a warm corner, out of the sun.

Morning. Foam under cheesecloth, the jar smells sour. A child peeks in and asks why it's moving. The honest answer: two teams of microbes, one makes gas, the other acid. An adult asks a different question that same morning. How much alcohol is in there. Not much, like in kefir. GOST 31494-2012 allows up to 1.2 percent. Anything on a regular American shelf is under half a percent, otherwise it would be sold as alcohol. Homemade kvass is close to factory-made after two days. Forgotten in the warmth for a week, it gets stronger up to one and a half to two percent. Pediatricians in North America don't allow alcohol for children at all; the family decides the rest. Figures by country and type are in the table below.

Third day. Taste. If sweet, another 24 hours. Strain into bottles, put a couple of raisins in each, close tightly. Half a day in a warm place to build up gas. The bottle swells and crackles. Now into the fridge, fermentation stops there. Drink for a week. Do not throw away the sediment from the bottom, this is the starter for the next time, the second batch of kvass is always better than the first. The remainder by the end of the week goes into Okroshka, it needs exactly that kind, sour and unsweetened, sweet store-bought kvass ruins it. A separate text will be dedicated to okroshka. Grams, minutes, and a timer for each step are in the recipe card below, along with six instances when the kvass didn't work out. The most frequent one: it doesn't fizz. Almost always because the bottle was put in the cold immediately, without letting it sit in the warmth. Or the raisins were coated in oil.

Kvass next to kombucha on an American shelf

Let's go back to the shelf. Kombucha in glass, with the word probiotic on the label. Nearby is kvass, in plastic, with bread in the ingredients. Inside, they have the same thing: fermentation. The difference is in the raw materials. Kombucha grows on sweetened tea, kvass on bread. One has a vinegary taste with fruit, the other has a bread-like, almost filling taste. Beer is a relative of kvass in terms of malt and yeast, except kvass fermentation is stopped right at the beginning, while beer is brought to the end. Root beer is similar to kvass in color and nothing else; inside it's soda with flavoring. All shelf neighbors are laid out in the table below.

Real kvass is also on this shelf. Russian stores import fermented kvass from Russia, Lithuania, and Latvia. Lithuanian kvass is often closer to homemade than Russian kvass with a long shelf life. Look for the word «брожения» (fermentation) on the label. Without it, the bottle contains a kvass beverage—water with sugar and food coloring. Local ones have also appeared. Small American breweries bottle kvass drink in glass and place it next to kombucha. This is how people who have never heard a single Russian word try kvass for the first time.

Kombucha is trendy, kvass next to it looks like a poor country relation. Vyazemsky would have been pleased. Two hundred years have passed, and kvass is still kvass-like.

A word that cannot be translated

Attempts to translate «kvass» into English have been made many times. Bread soda. Fermented rye drink. Russian kvass with an explanation in parentheses. Each option explains something, and none of them translates it. Dictionaries have given up and written kvass in Latin script, alongside borscht and samovar.

A schoolboy from a Russian-speaking family gets an assignment in an American school about a «Russian traditional drink» and brings the word home. The teacher did not mean tea. He finds this out, then finds out that the word «kvass» shares a root with «sour» [kisly], starter culture [zakvaska], and sauerkraut [kvashenaya kapusta]. Then he learns about the verb "kvasit", which has a completely different meaning in colloquial speech, and the child is better off being warned about this before he calls his grandmother. All the words of this word family are collected in the glossary below.

And then a jar appears on the windowsill. For three days, the child peeks under the cheesecloth. Sees it move. Asks about raisins. Hears about Vyazemsky and doesn't understand what patriotism has to do with it. After that, the word «kvass» stops being just a line in a dictionary. It becomes a thing he held in his hands. A jar of bread on a windowsill in Boston doesn't convince anyone of anything. It just hisses.