Most sauerkraut is made the dry way. You shred the cabbage, add salt, massage it until the juices run, pack it down and wait. It works. It's been working for centuries. Across Germany, Eastern Europe, Korea — every fermentation tradition has its own version of the same principle. Salt draws moisture from the vegetable. That moisture becomes the brine. The brine protects everything.
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 amount of 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.
We don't approximate. The wet brine method means the salt concentration is exact from the start. 2.5% for the krauts. 2.0% for the fruit ferments. Not a handful of salt. Not "until it tastes right." A number, calculated, applied the same way every time.
That consistency matters more than people realise. 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.
What happens to the vegetable
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. The texture of a dry-brined kraut can be denser, more compressed, more intensely flavoured in a particular way.
But we've found that wet brine produces a brighter ferment. The vegetables stay more open. The cultures distribute more evenly through the jar. The flavour develops in a way that's layered rather than concentrated — complex without being heavy. For the jalapeño in the Xalapa, for the bird's eye chilli in the Adana, wet brine lets those flavours carry through the whole jar rather than sitting in pockets.
It's also why we can use whole or roughly cut pieces rather than fine shreds. The brine gets to everything.
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. The salt. The acidity. The particular character of whatever vegetable was in the jar.
The brine from the Adana Kraut tastes like the ferment itself — spicy, earthy, sharp. The Xalapa brine is bright and hot in a clean way. People have told us they cook with it, add it to dressings, stir it into soups. Some drink it straight.
We've seen this. We don't discourage it.
With dry-brined ferments, the brine volume is smaller and less consistent. It varies batch to batch. With wet brine, the brine is a designed part of the product. We want you to use it.
Why we're making this argument at all
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.
The dry method produces a great product. We just think the wet brine produces a better one.
We're not willing to make that call quietly.