We don't do it
the easy way.
Most sauerkraut is made the dry way. Salt draws moisture from the vegetable. That moisture becomes the brine. It works. It's been working for centuries. Every fermentation tradition has its own version of the same principle. It's elegant. It's ancient. And we don't do it that way.
Every Canbo product — including the krauts — uses a wet brine. Salt dissolved in water, poured over the vegetables, submerged completely. It's more work. It takes more precision. It requires calculating the total weight of vegetable and water together before a single gram of salt goes in.
And it gives us something the dry method can't: consistency, control, and a brine worth keeping.
The precision
argument
The dry method is inherently variable. The brine you end up with depends on the water content of the vegetable, which changes with the season, the variety, the weather, how long ago it was harvested. You're aiming for a salt concentration but you're not measuring it — you're approximating it, and hoping the vegetable cooperates.
salt concentration
salt concentration
every time
Salt concentration isn't just about flavour — it's about which bacteria thrive during fermentation. Too low and you risk spoilage organisms getting a foothold. Too high and you suppress the lactic acid bacteria you actually want. The window is narrow. We want to be in the middle of it, every batch, not hoping we got close.
Dry vs. wet
There's a school of thought that says dry-brined vegetables ferment better because the salt draws out the cell fluids slowly, concentrating the flavours. There's something to that. But wet brine produces a brighter ferment.
The brine
itself
Here's the part people don't talk about enough. After fermentation, what's left in the jar isn't just packing liquid. It's the result of seven days of bacterial activity — billions of live cultures suspended in a tangy, complex, deeply flavourful liquid that carries everything the fermentation produced.
Most people buying fermented food have no idea how it was made.
They don't know whether it was dry-brined or wet-brined, pasteurised or live, fermented for three days or three weeks. The jar says "fermented" and that's enough.
We think it should mean more than that. Wet brine is a choice. It's more labour-intensive than the dry method. It requires more equipment, more calculation, more attention at every stage. We do it because we think the result is better — more consistent, more flavourful, more alive when it reaches you. We're not willing to make that call quietly.
The dry method produces a great product. We just think the wet brine produces a better one.
More precise. More consistent. And a brine that's worth using — not discarding.