Making and drinking kvass

I have a tendency that when I'm tired and my mind is in overdrive - I go out in the kitchen and make something historical. This week it was "kvass". I hadn't heard about until I read this blog post by Historical living with Hvitr.. I got interested since is mentioned in sources back to the 10th century. Beer and breadmaking have been interconnected from the earliest history, since both are depending on yeast.  I even remember a book I read as a very young child that said "when the Egypticans wanted to make beer they started with making bread". Kvass as a drink that takes it's flavor from bread, and just a small bit of yeast, made me intrigued on if the taste would be close to these early kind of drinks. (I of course have no idea about this, but it made me curious). It is not unfeasible that this kind of drink would have been known in Sweden in the time period, after all most of our trading was to the East, and the area where I live have some Slavic burial finds.

Anyway I first set out to search for a Kvass recipe in Swedish - and it turned out if you do that you will not find anything realted to a drink made from rye bread. Kvass seems to be a name taken up by people who are into fermenting stuff, and used for all kinds of naturally fermented fruit drinks.* Anyway I decided to try out both kinds of kvass. For the ryebread  version I used the same recipe as Hvitr, it simply was the easiest to follow. For the Swedish recipe I followed this recipe for rhubarb kvass.

I only had access to 1 litre jars so I only made small batches. 

This is the rhubarb kvass. Everyone who tasted it liked it a lot. It had a bit of carbonation, but it disappeared quickly when I opened the bottle. It basically tasted lika very mild and non-sweet rhubarb lemonade. I'm definitely going to make variations of it again.

The origianl rye bread kvass I did a bit of miscalculation. As I said I only had a one litre jar, so I used less water, and didn't calculate that the bread would soak up a lot of liquid, so I only got 0,5 l of kvass in the end. The recipe I followed mentioned to toast the bread "like Chernobyl", but since I don't lie dark beers I only toasted it enough to make it completely dry.

As for the taste. It tasted very much like the Swedish drink "svagdricka", which is a fermented low-alcoholic malt drink. My kvass also had a distinct yeast flavour, and I don't know if that's how it's supposed to be, or if I failed the recipe. As it is it was a fascinating process to make proper kvass, but I'm not sure if it's worth the work if I can go to the store and buy a bottle that tastes the same in the supermarket.

* I'm thinking that all these Swedish health blogs that had recipes for fruit drinks that they called kvass chose to call them kvass to not relate the drink to mead, which after all is also a fermented drink from honey, but not exactly not known for any health properties.