Is there a certain food/drink that gets you in the holiday spirit?
With Christmas approaching, I’m beginning to see lots of recipes with vibrant red and green in them on my screen. One of them is cranberry rosemary cocktail. Well, we don’t have alcoholic beverages very often in our house. We are water kefir drinkers.
So I got inspired. This sparkling cranberry rosemary kefir punch is such an amazing drink that I can sip it all day. Better yet, I don’t have to worry about getting drunk.
(Sidenote: If you are interested in learning more about the benefit of water kefir and how to make it at home, please head over to my “how to make water kefir” post.)
Once you have your water kefir, you can blend the following ingredients in a blender.
Cranberries (fresh or frozen)
Fresh rosemary sprig
Sugar
Filter the solid (cranberry skins and rosemary sprigs) and place the collected liquid in a jar or bottle that you can seal tight. After leaving it at room temperature for 18-24 hours, this sparkling cranberry rosemary kefir punch is ready to enjoy. The tighter you seal the bottle, the more the bubbles (carbon dioxide produced during the fermentation) will be trapped in the bottle. Don’t shake the bottle and open it slowly.
Don’t worry about the addition of sugar if you can’t consume sugar for your diet. Sugar will be the food to feed the good bacteria in the water kefir. At the end of fermentation, it will all be consumed by the bacteria. What does it leave behind? A probiotic rich, fizzy, sparkling, and slightly alcohol taste kefir punch.
The combination of cranberries and rosemary is nothing but amazing. Cranberries adds a sweet tangy taste and blends extremely well with the piney, woodsy, and pungent flavor of rosemary. Add a little bit of pure stevia powder to make it sweeter if you’d like to. Is this perfect for Christmas or what? Don’t be surprised if you find your bottle empty soon after making it. Bottoms up!
- 8 cups water kefir
- 1 cup cranberries frozen or fresh
- 2 sprigs fresh rosemary
- 2 teaspoons sugar
- optional ⅛ teaspoons pure stevia extract powder
- In a high-speed blender, blend water kefir with ¾ cup of cranberries, 1 sprig of fresh rosemary, and stevia (if used). It’s OK if you don’t blend it very smooth. Pour the kefir punch mixture over a fine-mesh strainer and collect the liquid.
- Transfer the liquid into a bottle, add the sugar and the remaining cranberries and rosemary. Seal the bottle tight. The tighter the seal, the fizzier the kefir punch will be. Let the kefir punch stand at room temperature to ferment for 18-24 hours. Place the bottle in refrigerator for at least 2 hours before opening.
- The beverage tastes best when served cold.
1. If you don’t have a blender, you can crush the cranberries and briefly mince the rosemary before adding them into your water kefir. This will help the flavors get infused into the kefir punch.
2. If you are going to open the bottle at the end of fermentation before refrigerating it, do not shake the bottle and open very slowly. Place the bottle into a large bowl in case the kefir punch foams up and spills.