What this is
Kvas is an open knowledge base for safe and reproducible homemade kvass. Zhizha is the project brand and personality. Version 1.1.0 provides the same document structure in five languages, as PDFs and web pages.
3-liter baseline
- water - 3 l;
- fully dry bread crackers - 180-220 g;
- preferably 150 g white + 50-70 g rye or Borodinsky;
- sugar or panela - 100-120 g;
- malt - 20-30 g, or rye flour - 10-20 g;
- fresh yeast - 2-3 g, or dry yeast - 0.5-1 g, for the first batch only.
Do not add new yeast to later batches; use 500 ml old kvass/starter or 3-5 tbsp sediment instead.
Short process
- Toast bread until dark golden.
- Pour over boiling water and infuse for 4-8 hours.
- Strain and keep only the liquid.
- Add sweetener and cool to 25-35°C.
- Add starter and ferment for 8-12 hours under cloth or a loose lid.
- When the smell is normal and bubbles appear, bottle in plastic.
- Carbonate for 2-6 hours and refrigerate as soon as the bottle becomes firm.
- Chill for at least 8 hours.
Sugar, panela, maltose, and malt
Bread contains mostly starch, and yeast does not turn it into sugar by itself. A controlled sweetener is therefore needed in the simple recipe. Panela replaces white sugar roughly 1:1 and adds molasses notes. Maltose can ferment but does not replace malt flavor or enzymes. Malt extract is usually better than pure maltose for malt aroma.
Batch state
The AI agent maintains one explicit state: planning, bread_preparation, infusion, straining, cooling, inoculation, primary_fermentation, ready_to_bottle, bottling, bottle_conditioning, chilling, ready, discard, or unknown. Unknown values remain null; stages change only after user confirmation.
Safety
Primary fermentation must not be tightly sealed. After bottle conditioning, refrigerate a plastic bottle as soon as it becomes firm. Discard the batch for mold, fuzzy growth, colored spots, slime, rotten smell, acetone smell, meat-like smell, or sewage smell.
Resources
- AI agent instruction:
agent-instructions/kvas-agent.en.md - State model:
agent-instructions/state-model.en.md - JSON Schema:
agent-instructions/state.schema.json - Full protocol:
recipes/kvas-reproducible.md - Batch log:
docs/batch-log-template.md - Repository: https://github.com/bambuchastudent/kvas-ai-agent