Culture club: Kefir is the new fermented kid on the block

A fermented product that's appearing more and more on supermarket shelves, what kind of benefit can kefir bring to our diets?

Valerie Kingston of Glenilen Farm in West Cork with Glenilen Kefir Yoghurt. Picture Denis Minihane.

In a world where kombucha is easy to pick up at a service station shop and sauerkraut sits next to hummus on supermarket shelves, kefir is the new fermented kid on the block that’s making inroads into our daily lives. There are two different types of kefir: milk kefir and water kefir, both of which deliver probiotics. While water kefir is dairy-free - useful for vegans or those who want to avoid dairy - milk kefir has the edge when it comes to the variety of beneficial bacteria and yeasts it contains.

Though it might be relatively new to us, milk kefir has a long history of being made and consumed in the Northern Caucasus mountains that divides Asia and Europe, an area notable for having a high number of centenarians. For many people in Ireland, their first introduction to kefir was via the 2017 publication of The Psychobiotic Revolution: Mood, Food, and the New Science of the Gut-Brain Connection by UCC academics John Cryan and Ted Dinan and US science writer Scott Anderson.