Summer is coming! It doesn’t really look like it at the moment, with all the thunderstorms and flood like rains here in Germany, but I can assure you, it’s coming!

I discovered the perfect summer drink for me. Fresh fruit is available in abundace right now, and I managed to grab two wonderfully ripe pineapples at the market. Most of the flesh went into a pineapple shrimp curry or was eaten standing at the counter, and the core and peels were turned into tepache.

Tepache is a mexican, fermented pineapple drink. All you need is organic pineapple scraps (the peels have way more flavor than the flesh), water to cover, and a bit of brown sugar. It’s easy and absolutely foolproof. You just pile everything into a big jar, cover the top with a cloth or a glass lid so the fruit flies can’t get in, move it to a quiet corner on the counter, and let nature take its course. Just stir every now and then so nothing pokes out of the liquid.

If you feel fancy, you can add a cinnamon stick and some cloves.

You can let things ferment for something beween 3 days and 6 weeks. At first, your sugar water gets foamy and fizzy and you end up with a soda-like pineapple drink with a bit of a tang. That’s the stage I love the most and the point when I filter my drink into a swingtop bottle and move it into the fridge. My tepache feels perfect after about 4-5 days.

If you wait about 10 days, your drink will get more sour and develop alcohol. It’s like a pineapple champagne then. Also very good, but not exactly work safe.

Stage 3 would be when the alcohol ferments and turns into vinegar. Absolutely fantastic pineapple vinegar that would need filtering and an additional few months in a bottle to ripen to perfection. You see, things can’t go wrong, even if you forget your tepache.

What you need is:

• scraps (core, and peel) from an organic pineapple
• water to cover
• about 100g brown sugar per 2 liters of water
• cinnamon stick and 4-5 cloves if you like
• I skip the cinnamon and cloves and add a few sprigs of mint or lemon balm to the scraps

Cover, stir, let ferment and at last, ENJOY!

A word of advice though: Burp the bottle daily if you keep it in the fridge for a while. Mine was left unsupervised for nearly two weeks due to family emergency and I had to wash my kitchen’s wooden ceiling (and cupboard, and walls, and floor…) after opening the bottle. Those two finger’s widths of tepache left in the bottle were amazing though!