Honey Tepache Calculator

How much pineapple, honey, water, and spice do you need for a traditional Mexican tepache, and how long until it's ready? Inputs scale this tool's cooking convention (80 g/L honey, 280 g/L pineapple rinds, 24–72 h kitchen window at 18–30 °C) — not an Escalante 2008 tepache recipe. Escalante 2008 is a pulque community paper. Output is pineapple weight (g, oz), honey weight (g, oz, tbsp), water volume (mL, fl oz, cups), cinnamon stick + clove counts, F1 and F2 timing as kitchen practice. Alcohol content is not calculated.

2.0quarts (1.89 L)
0.5 qt (test)2 qt (typical)8 qt (party)
Pineapple use

Rinds-only — traditional, zero-waste. Eat the flesh, ferment the rinds + core. The brown spots and cut-edges carry the densest microbiota; DO NOT scrub the skin, just rinse off dirt and trim away anything spoiled. One medium pineapple (~2 kg) gives ~600 g of rinds + core.

Sweetness target (honey g/L)
Spice level

Classic — Diana Kennedy 1986 anchor. One Mexican (or Ceylon) cinnamon stick per litre + four cloves per litre. Crack the cinnamon stick in half before adding to expose more surface; whole cloves only — ground cloves over-extract within hours.

Fermentation temperature
Honey for the tepache
151g
(5.3 oz · 7.2 tbsp)
Use a mild floral honey — clover, wildflower, orange blossom, mesquite, or avocado. Mavric 2008 measured Manuka MGO in agar assays against E. coli and S. aureus, not a tepache trial. High-MGO Manuka may suppress microbes in a sweet must; no tepache trial shows that a Manuka batch fails to start.
Recipe
530
Pineapple (g) · 18.7 oz
151
Honey (g) · ≈ 107 mL
1785
Water (mL) · 60.4 fl oz · 7.55 cup
2 + 8
Cinnamon sticks + cloves

Equipment: wide-mouth glass jar or food-grade plastic bucket with room for the liquid allowance, fruit and foam headspace; wooden or silicone spoon (never metal — acid corrodes), breathable cloth + rubber band, fine-mesh sieve, swing-top bottles for F2. Use filtered or chlorine-free water — chlorine kills the wild yeasts on the pineapple rinds.

Alcohol content is unmeasured

Fermentation can produce alcohol. The honey preset, time, taste and bubbles cannot establish a batch's ABV or show that it is below 0.5%. Continued fermentation after bottling can change alcohol content and pressure.

TTB guidance for kombucha discusses testing and continued fermentation; it does not validate this tepache recipe or a non-alcoholic labeling claim. Choose a drink with verified alcohol content if avoiding alcohol is essential.

Warm ferment — 36–48 h primary at 22–26 °C (textbook anchor)
  1. Hour 0: combine pineapple + honey + water + spices in a wide-mouth glass jar (large enough for the liquid allowance, fruit and foam headspace). Stir with a wooden / silicone spoon. Cover with breathable cloth + rubber band.
  2. Hour 12–24: foam ring, steady bubbling. Stir twice daily. Honey draws juice from the rind cells; spices steep into the must.
  3. Hour 36–48: taste at 36 h. Classic tepache is lightly sweet, mildly tart, with cinnamon-clove backbone and pineapple-cider top notes. Strain when sweetness + tartness are balanced.
  4. Strain into swing-top bottles, 1.5–2 cm headspace. Condition 12–24 h at room temp for carbonation. Refrigerate to slow fermentation.
Method. Batch volume is the nominal honey-plus-water allowance before adding fruit; the finished strained yield is unmeasured. Pineapple grams = total_L × 280 (rinds) or × 220 (whole fruit). Honey grams = total_L × honey_g_per_L (Light 50 / Classic 80 / Rich 100). Water mL = total_mL − honey_mL where honey_mL = honey_g / 1.4204. This density is a cooking estimate interpolated from FAO Table 2.4 at 20°C and assumed 17.5% moisture, approximating specific gravity numerically as g/mL. Actual honey varies; weigh it for precise amounts. Cinnamon sticks + cloves scale linearly with volume per the Diana Kennedy 1986 anchor (1 cinnamon + 4 cloves per L at Classic spice). Sweetness presets set ingredient amounts; they do not predict final alcohol content.

Why pineapple rinds, not flesh. Traditional tepache uses rinds and core. Romero-Luna 2017 reviews organisms reported in several Mexican fermented drinks; it is not a metagenomic proof that flesh is sterile or that rinds always start. Rinds-only is zero-waste cooking practice. Whole-fruit is a sweeter setting because flesh adds juice.

Why honey at 1.0x piloncillo by weight. 1.0x is this tool's cooking convention, not a sensory trial and not a piloncillo figure from Escalante 2008 (a pulque paper). USDA FoodData Central item 09266 lists about 13.1 g sugars per 100 g ripe raw pineapple; that is fruit composition, not a substitution proof. Shrubs on this site still use 0.75x honey-for-sugar because those recipes treat honey as the main sweetener.

Tepache is a wild ferment, not a SCOBY. No prebuilt mother culture is required — the pineapple rinds carry their own consortium. This is the structural difference from kombucha + jun (require a SCOBY pellicle) and from ginger bug (requires 5–7 d of activation feeding before brewing). Use the kombucha calculator for SCOBY brews, the ginger-bug calculator for wild-yeast soda starters, the mead calculator for honey-only fermentation, and the shrub-vinegar calculator for non-fermented fruit-honey-vinegar maceration.

Spoilage indicators. Healthy tepache: foam ring, pineapple-cider aroma, light effervescence. A white film is often identified as Kahm yeast in other ferments; that call is kitchen practice, not a lab result. Fuzzy or colored growth means discard the batch. Solvent or nail-polish aroma is a reason to stop. Always store in glass.

Planning tool, not a yield guarantee. Real fermentation kinetics vary ±20 % depending on pineapple ripeness, ambient humidity, indigenous microbiota density, and honey botanical origin. Taste at the early end of the temperature-specific window and decide by palate, not clock.

Honey Tepache Calculator — rawhoneyguide.com