How much pineapple, honey, water, and spice do you need for a traditional Mexican tepache, and how long until it's ready? Inputs scale the Escalante 2008 / Romero-Luna 2017 anchor recipe (80 g/L sweetener, 280 g/L pineapple rinds, 24–72 h wild fermentation at 18–30 °C). Output is pineapple weight (g, oz), honey weight (g, oz, tbsp), water volume (mL, fl oz, cups), cinnamon stick + clove counts, F1 primary fermentation timing at chosen temperature, F2 bottle conditioning timing, and estimated final ABV.
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. Avoid manuka and other high-MGO honeys: their non-peroxide antibacterial activity (Mavric 2008) suppresses the rind-borne LAB + yeast consortium and can stall the ferment outright.
Recipe
530
Pineapple (g) · 18.7 oz
151
Honey (g) · ≈ 106 mL
1786
Water (mL) · 60.4 fl oz · 7.55 cup
2 + 8
Cinnamon sticks + cloves
Equipment: wide-mouth glass jar or food-grade plastic bucket (≥ 1.5x final volume for 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.
Estimated final ABV
0.7%
(full primary; F2 adds < 0.1 %)
Tepache is a low-alcohol soda — Romero-Luna 2017 reports 0.5–1.0 % ABV at the 80 g/L sweetener anchor. Federal labelling thresholds: U.S. TTB non-alcoholic < 0.5 % ABV; "low-alcohol" 0.5–2.5 %. Most tepache lands in the low-alcohol band — not appropriate for under-21 service even though the perceived alcohol is minimal.
Warm ferment — 36–48 h primary at 22–26 °C (textbook anchor)
Hour 0: combine pineapple + honey + water + spices in a wide-mouth glass jar (≥ 1.5x final volume). Stir with a wooden / silicone spoon. Cover with breathable cloth + rubber band.
Hour 12–24: foam ring, steady bubbling. Stir twice daily. Honey draws juice from the rind cells; spices steep into the must.
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.
Strain into swing-top bottles, 1.5–2 cm headspace. Condition 12–24 h at room temp for carbonation. Refrigerate to halt.
Method. 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 / 1.4225 (NHB density at 17 % moisture). Cinnamon sticks + cloves scale linearly with volume per the Diana Kennedy 1986 anchor (1 cinnamon + 4 cloves per L at Classic spice). Final ABV reflects the sweetness preset at full primary fermentation.
Why pineapple rinds, not flesh. Romero-Luna 2017 metagenomic survey shows the dense LAB + yeast microbiota live on the pineapple-skin epidermis, not in the flesh. The rinds-only traditional method is zero-waste AND microbially correct — eat the flesh, ferment the skin. Whole-fruit tepache works because residual surface microbiota cling to the cut faces, but you trade biodiversity for sweetness.
Why honey at 1.0x piloncillo by weight. Pineapple's natural fructose dominates perceived sweetness in tepache, masking honey's intrinsic 25 % sweetness premium over sucrose (USDA FDC 169640 vs 169655). The 1.0x mass substitution at the 80 g/L Escalante 2008 / Romero-Luna 2017 piloncillo anchor lands close to the textbook traditional flavor profile. By contrast: a shrub-vinegar at 0.75x honey-for-sugar (no fructose-rich substrate) and a mead at carefully-titrated honey-as-sole- sugar (where every gram of sweetness comes from the honey).
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, finish pH 3.5–4.0. Spoiled: visible mould (NOT Kahm yeast — Kahm is a harmless white surface film and you skim it off; mould is fuzzy and coloured, discard the entire batch), persistent solvent / nail-polish aroma (acetobacter past the acid stage producing esters), or unexplained viscosity drop. Always store in glass — vinegar leaches plasticisers from PET over weeks.
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.