Cherry Vinegar?!?

[NickTheGreat]

Hey all,

I wandered over here from the Beer side of the forums.

So my family and I went and picked berries this weekend and picked a gallon of sour pie cherries. This was Saturday, and I made the mistake of rinsing them and laying them out to dry. So I thought. I put them back in the bucket with a paper towel until this morning . . .

Went to make our cherry pie and they smell like vinegar. Perhaps wine, but smell and taste sour. 80% of them are darkish in color and are starting to taste vinegary.

Is there anything I can do with these things? I'm sure it's past the wine/cider point in time? But can I chop them up and let them become vinegar? Or am I just going to make some nasty prison-wine type of thing?

We're only talking ~$15 worth of cherries and we still have the "memories" of picking them in the rain. So it's not a total loss.

 

[Erik the Awful]

I've been making cherry wine for a couple years now. My cherries are a little more akin to sandplums, fairly sour when they're fresh. I typically pick them, triple-rinse them, and immediately put them in the freezer. When I'm ready to make wine I thaw them and pretty much immediately put them in the blender.

I really don't think your cherries are already turned to vinegar after four days. Sugar's cheap. Sugar them up and see if it tastes like pie filling. If so, press on. If it tastes terrible, oh well. If you want to make cherry vinegar, there are recipes out there.

 

[NickTheGreat]

Yeah I'm sure they haven't turned yet but I don't know if they'd taste good as pie. I might try testing a handful as pie filling just in case.

Thanks for the advice.

 

[bernardsmith]

You might first douse the cherries in K-meta to kill any bacteria and yeast on them and that I would think might kill all aceto bacter that might be feeding on any alcohol that any indigenous yeast may have produced.... You need alcohol for the aceto bacter to make vinegar - no alcohol - no vinegar (vin-e-gar) .