Homemade Vinegar

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flyonline
Posts: 42
Joined: Sat Jun 22, 2013 5:58 pm

Homemade Vinegar

Post by flyonline »

Anyone else making their own vinegar? I've been playing around with it for a while now. I originally picked up a vinegar mother from work - actually, from the vineyard rather than the winery - they were trialing using a vinegar weed spray (organic vineyard so no glyphosates). They'd be unhappy with a vinegar culture in a winery :lol: (more on that in a bit).

So I've been mucking around with red wine mostly, but also white wine, beer and my own home grown apple cider. It's so easy to do, and the results are great I thought I'd put it out there for anyone else wanting to have a crack. The procedure is pretty simple, it's mostly waiting around for the culture to do it's thing. Start with your base brew (beer, wine etc.), add culture, store in loose lidded container but covered to keep flies out in a dark lukewarm environment and wait. Once ready, decant or draw off the clear vinegar, use and add further alcohol to the culture to keep it going. It's easy to tell when it's ready, it smells like vinegar :roll: :lol: Seriously, it's not difficult to tell if you want to use it, your nose will inform you very quickly if it's good or bad.

First, start with a mother. Since most people don't know anyone that has a mother, there are a few ways to get one going.
1. Buy some organic apple cider vinegar (ACV). If it's got floaties/sediment in it, that's part of the culture/mother. Let settle, decant most of the liquid off then add your vinegar base.
2. Start your own culture. I've done this a couple of times, once with some home grown apples mushed up a bit, with some water and left to ferment and then vinegarise (technical term :wink: ). I also made some home made cider, fermenting the juice with the intention of bottling it as cider, but life got in the way and it ended up turning to vinegar itself so I've now got some ACV instead. Organic apples would be the go here, most big chain apples would be washed and waxed preventing the bugs hanging on to stay around. If you're lucky enough to live around some fruit trees, but apples in particular you can start it with this method here. Because I had access to unsulphured wine, I used that diluted down rather than the banana peel. Ironically, I started a culture at work in the winery which looks like the best of the couple of strains I've used so far. You can get low or unsulphured wine (yuck!) but it's pretty easy to remove most of the sulphur in table wine. Just pour into a large sealed bottle and shake the snot out of it for a bit. Repeat a couple of times then leave for a few days before using.
3. Buy a mother online.
4. Twist the arm of someone that has some already.....I might be convinced to decant a bit of the mother off if someone is interested in having a go :wink:

Second, get some base for your vinegar. As with making anything, good in = good out so don't go using a $2 goon wine and expect to make something amazing. I've had the quickest results using beer, but anything alcoholic will work. It's worth diluting wine down a little back to something a little weaker, particularly to start with before the mother builds up. I usually dilute 1:1 with filtered water (make sure there's no chlorine, another anti-bactericide). Once it's going strong I don't usually bother too much. I've done it in tiny micro batches of a few '00mLs up to 20L worth and have a 200L barrel that I plan on filling when I can. Just need to add a tap first. I'd stick with glass by preference, it can become so acidic that it will attack any plastic container but for short term fun I can't see the harm in using bottles that previously held soft drinks as they're very acidic themselves.

Here's a pic of my malt (beer based) vinegar, excellent in chutneys! The layers of the culture are fairly obvious, they seem to form on the surface, then drop down over time or if the bottle is bumped.

Image

Third, wait. It can take some time (six months or more), particularly in a cold area but it's so worth it. Plus, you have a never ending stream of vinegar that you can tailor make to your needs and give away. If you get impatient you can use it before it's fully mature, it will just taste less strongly of vinegar and more strongly of the base. Trust your nose if in doubt, but I've only had one batch go bad on me. I have a couple currently that are a little 'stinky' but a bit of a re-fresh with an aquarium bubbler seems to remove most of the ponk and the same goes if it gets a little 'hot' on the nose. I suspect in both cases that the lack of oxygen is to blame.

I often add herbs to a smaller bottle in the kitchen. Because it is a living thing, the culture will keep growing if there is food available to it in the form of alcohol. If you decant some off for use, even if you can't see the culture in the bottle it can form over time so don't be surprised if another culture forms in a 'cooking' bottle. I've also taken some of my full strength aged vinegar to the lab at work and it is VERY acidic, even more so than wine and well below required acidity levels for pickling, bottling etc. and usually requires diluting down. It makes awesome salad dressings, marinades and additions to chutneys and the like.

Hope this interests or helps someone.

Steve
beachbums
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Joined: Sun Dec 05, 2010 5:51 pm
Location: Smokefireandfood.com

Re: Homemade Vinegar

Post by beachbums »

Hi Steve, I'd never even thought about making vinegar so your excellent writeup on how it's done is a great read. Beer vinegar is a new concept for me, what does it taste like and where would you use it?
On another tack we use vinegar ( the cheap bulk nasty stuff) a lot for cleaning around home. Adding a bit to the automatic washing machine stops the build up of the grey gludge that grows in them and act as a bit of a fabric conditioner too. Great on glass etc and with a bit of carb soda is good for getting that burnt bit off the bottom of the pots and pans. Have you tried one of your stronger more acidic brews for this sort of thing?

Cheers, Wayne and Jan
flyonline
Posts: 42
Joined: Sat Jun 22, 2013 5:58 pm

Re: Homemade Vinegar

Post by flyonline »

beachbums wrote:Hi Steve, I'd never even thought about making vinegar so your excellent writeup on how it's done is a great read. Beer vinegar is a new concept for me, what does it taste like and where would you use it?
On another tack we use vinegar ( the cheap bulk nasty stuff) a lot for cleaning around home. Adding a bit to the automatic washing machine stops the build up of the grey gludge that grows in them and act as a bit of a fabric conditioner too. Great on glass etc and with a bit of carb soda is good for getting that burnt bit off the bottom of the pots and pans. Have you tried one of your stronger more acidic brews for this sort of thing?

Cheers, Wayne and Jan
The thought has crossed my mind, but the red wine vinegar is so colourful in particular that I would be reluctant to use it on any surface I didn't want stained. To make a white vinegar, it would be pretty simple to either de-colourise a light coloured alcohol using charcoal, or simply ferment out a water and sugar based alcohol or other clear alcohol base (gin, vodka etc.). I have thought of using it as a weed spray too instead of roundup in sensitive areas, but it would likely need distilling to a higher acidity or addition of acetic acid.

Malt vinegar is more or less beer vinegar, so it is somewhat more savoury than a wine vinegar. Beer is just fermented malted barley after all :wink: It's unfortunate that a lot of malt vinegar is pretty nasty stuff too. I often use it in chutneys, it matches in very well and doesn't turn everything into a deep red like red wine vinegar. Haven't tried white wine vinegar much yet, we only make red at work :| I am trying to start a couple of fortified vinegars, but they're being difficult and I suspect that the very high sugar level might be the problem, even diluted down it struggles to get going.

By co-incidence I happened to have a chat with a local winemaker who was making vinegar on a commercial scale and they were turning it around in about a week from memory. His comments were that it wouldn't be good to cook with though :shock:
niko123456
Posts: 131
Joined: Mon Dec 29, 2014 8:20 pm

Post by niko123456 »

I need to do this. Have always got bits at the end of red wine bottles hanging around that would make great vinegar.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk
Gumb

Re: Homemade Vinegar

Post by Gumb »

Great write up fly, thanks for posting, it's really good information.
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