We could have just
bottled the juice.
It would have been easier. Press the greens, bottle them, pasteurise for shelf life, done by Tuesday. Instead we add days, variability, and a great deal that can go wrong.
Here is why we think that is worth it — what fermentation actually is, what it does, how we know it has worked, and where the evidence genuinely sits. Start from zero if you like; everything is explained as it comes up.
You already eat
fermented food.
Bread, cheese, yoghurt, beer, wine, coffee, chocolate, soy sauce, kimchi, salami, vinegar. Humans have been fermenting for thousands of years, and for most of that time without the faintest idea microbes existed — it was simply how you kept food edible through a winter, and how you made it taste better on the way. Nearly every culture on earth arrived at it independently. All we have done is point a very old technique at an unusually concentrated plant, and resist every temptation to speed it up.
30–45 days
45–90+ days
Days, bubbles
and a pH meter.
Fermentation is a living process, so it does not run to a stopwatch. You cannot set a timer and walk away. These are the three things we actually go by.
What fermentation actually is
Fermentation is what happens when microbes — bacteria and yeasts, the useful sort — are allowed to feed on the sugars and starches in food, in conditions where they thrive and unwanted organisms do not.
As they feed, they produce acids. Those acids do three things at once: they change the flavour, they break the food down into simpler forms, and they make the environment too sour for anything harmful to take hold. That last part is why fermented food keeps without a fridge or a preservative, and why humans worked it out long before anyone knew microbes existed.
It is not decay. Decay is the wrong microbes winning. Fermentation is deliberately giving the right ones the advantage.
What's happening to the plant
Plant cell walls are cellulose, and humans are not built to break cellulose down efficiently. A good deal of what is inside a leaf stays locked in the fibre and passes straight through you.
Fermentation is microbes doing part of that work in advance — opening the cell walls so more of what was already in the plant becomes available to you rather than to your bin. They leave behind live cultures and organic acids on the way through.
What it does not do is manufacture nutrients from nothing. Some B vitamins can increase during fermentation, but we have not measured ours, so we are not going to claim it.
It also makes it taste of something
This is the part nobody mentions, and the part you will actually notice. Those organic acids are flavour. They are why Big Shot has a tang rather than tasting like a lawn, and why the Powder comes out savoury rather than grassy.
Same reason sourdough beats flour and water, and yoghurt is more interesting than milk. Fermentation does not only preserve food and make it more available — it makes it taste better. Which is exactly why we have never needed sweeteners to get it down you.
Wild, not inoculated
Most commercial ferments use a laboratory starter culture — a known strain, in a known quantity, producing the same result every time. It is the sensible way to do it.
We ferment wild. The cultures come from the apple cider vinegar mother and from the plants themselves. It is slower, more variable and considerably more demanding to get right. It also produces something with more character than a single strain ever will.
Two ferments, two methods
Big Shot is a liquid ferment — the pressed juice of five microgreens with apple, ginger, lemon and the vinegar mother, left to develop and bottled cold.
The Powder is a brine ferment. The pulp left in the press goes into a Blackthorn sea salt brine and ferments from scratch, before drying at 40 degrees. Same principle, entirely different process, and neither is a shortcut of the other.
36
healthy adults, ten weeks, randomised — and the fermented-food group came out measurably different.
In 2021 Stanford put 36 healthy adults on either a fermented-food diet or a high-fibre one for ten weeks. In the fermented group, gut microbial diversity increased, with larger servings producing stronger effects. Four types of immune cell showed less activation, and 19 inflammatory proteins measured in blood came down.
The high-fibre comparison group — legumes, seeds, whole grains, nuts, vegetables, fruit — showed neither of those things over the same period. Worth sitting with, because most of us would have assumed the fibre arm was the healthier diet.
This is a small study of fermented foods generally, not of our product. But it is a randomised human trial with a clear result, and there are not many of those in this field. If you are wondering what inflammatory proteins are and whether you want fewer of them, the first question below explains it.
What we can
and can't say.
Fermentation attracts more loose language than almost anything else in food. Here is where we draw our lines — starting with a term that gets thrown about far too casually.
Hang on — isn't inflammation supposed to be a good thing?
Sometimes, yes, and it is worth separating the two kinds because the word gets used very loosely.
Acute inflammation is essential. It is the heat and swelling around a cut, the soreness after a hard session at the gym, the fever that fights an infection. It is your immune system arriving at a problem and dealing with it, then standing down. Without it you would not survive a scratch.
Chronic low-grade inflammation is the other sort. It is quiet, persistent, and there is no wound to heal — the immune system simmering away with nothing useful to do. That state is consistently associated with cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and several other long-term conditions, and it tends to increase with age.
When a study measures inflammatory proteins in blood, as the Stanford one did, it is this second kind it is looking at. Those markers coming down is generally regarded as a good sign. It is not the same as switching off your immune system, which you would very much not want.
Why don't you call it a probiotic?
Because we are not allowed to, and because it would not be accurate. 'Probiotic' is a regulated term with a specific meaning — identified strains, in known quantities, with evidence behind that particular strain. What we have is live cultures from a wild ferment, which is a different thing.
Plenty of products in this category use the word anyway. We would rather tell you what we actually have.
Does the Stanford trial prove Big Shot does this?
No, and we want to be clear about that. The trial used a range of fermented foods — yoghurt, kefir, kimchi, kombucha, brined vegetables — not our product. It tells you something meaningful about fermented food as a category. It does not tell you what our particular bottle does in your particular body, and nobody has tested that.
How many live cultures are in a bottle?
We do not know, and we would rather say so than invent a number. Counting viable cultures needs laboratory testing we have not yet done. What we can tell you is the process: wild fermented, never pasteurised, never heated, pH-checked every batch, and kept chilled from bottling to your fridge — all the conditions that keep cultures alive.
Read it
yourself.
Links go to the original research rather than to somebody's summary of it.
All of that,
in thirty millilitres.
Big Shot is the liquid ferment, kept chilled and drunk neat. The Powder is the brine ferment, dried gently and stirred into whatever you are already eating.
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