Summer Street Drink · Fermented Rye Bread
Kvass
📷 Closely related photo — Photo: Jorge Láscar / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.0
Kvass barely counts as alcoholic by Russian legal standards — under 1.2%, the same threshold that classifies it as a non-alcoholic beverage — and across the Soviet era, tank trucks selling it from a single shared metal mug were a common summer sight reaching all the way into Kazakhstan.
Rye bread is fermented into a lightly fizzy, faintly sour, barely alcoholic drink, sold ice-cold from tanker trucks and roadside barrels through the summer months. Petropavlovsk and other northern Kazakh cities near the Russian border keep the tradition alive with vendors setting up curbside taps as soon as the weather turns hot.
Why it's made this way: Petropavlovsk sits on the Ishim River just south of the Russian border and carries a strong Russian and Cossack settlement history; kvass followed that Russian influence south and remains one of the clearest culinary markers of the region's Slavic heritage.
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Part of World of Street Food — 3248 dishes from 118 countries.
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