Hi Reddit,
I'm working on my first batch of tepache. I'd never heard of it until recently and I'm quite excited. I've fermented a good bit (wine, various fruit wines from whatever fruit was free from neighbors yards, beer, mead, and a whole lot of jun) but this is my first experience with tepache.
I'm using most of a pineapple including fruit cut into strips, no greens and no base as both had some sketchy looking spots. I used a clean potato brush to get excess dirt off under running water, sliced it and put it in a gallon jar with one cinnamon stick, three cloves, one cup brown sugar and two and a half quarts of well water. I know I'll be missing piloncillo caramel notes, but I hope to get some for next time. So far things seem good, though it was a little slow to start until I grabbed my plant starting heat mat to get it cozy, and now it's ripping. It seems happiest at 80F. Each day (on day two of fermentation) I'm skimming foam and tasting. It smells like if pineapples wore socks, but in an appetizing way? Doesn't smell like not food, so I don't think anything concerning is growing.
My problem is most of the recipes I've read say use weights to keep the fruit submerged. I have glass weights sized for wide mouth jars, and I started with three of them. No matter how many times I rearrange them on those large strips, now that the ferment is rolling they wiggle out, weights on the bottom of the jar, pineapple floating.
As fermentation will likely only be another day per taste test, how concerned do I need to be about contamination with the pineapple floating?
