Vinegar- anybody make it?

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Here is the little yeast cake from the pineapple ferment. It actually smelled good like fresh yeast and pineapple. I was expecting it to be nasty. I was close to adding a braggs mother today but I think i'll hold off and see what it does on its own.

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nice, mine has darkened quite a bit in color and i think it's about ready. i have just been busy with other stuff and haven't gotten around to tasting it just yet, but it sure smells ready. i'll try to taste it tonight and maybe filter it/harvest the mother.

anyone know what the longevity of a mother is? i don't have anything else ready for it to ferment... i guess i could pull a quart of porter or something and see how that turns out.
 
finally got around to doing something with this. smell definitely indicated that it was vinegar, so i strained in through a coffee filter and a coarse strainer once, then again through a double coffee filter. stored in an old white vinegar bottle.

interestingly, there was no real mother on the top, there was a slight film, but nothing coherent. there was some junk at the bottom, but i didn't save that... i just decided to pour a shy quart of porter into a jar and put a few tablespoons of the active vinegar into it to see what happens.

this stuff is delicious! i tried a few spoonfuls and it has a definite fruit lambic type quality to it, except a little more acetic. it has a nice barnyardy brett nose and really does taste like a spontaneously fermented/sour beer. it has a nice acetic bite when you taste it and also a nice residual sweetness and a slight pineapple flavor... i tried a spoonful of commercial apple cider vinegar after tasting this and it tasted horrible... no comparison whatsoever. i'm really excited to use this!

here's a pic of straining it into the new jar. notice the 'krausen ring' on the jar i let it ferment in.

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some gunk in the bottom of the fermenting jar... maybe this was the mother?

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finished product.

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it was almost exactly two months from start to finish.
 
android said:
finally got around to doing something with this. smell definitely indicated that it was vinegar, so i strained in through a coffee filter and a coarse strainer once, then again through a double coffee filter. stored in an old white vinegar bottle.

interestingly, there was no real mother on the top, there was a slight film, but nothing coherent. there was some junk at the bottom, but i didn't save that... i just decided to pour a shy quart of porter into a jar and put a few tablespoons of the active vinegar into it to see what happens.

this stuff is delicious! i tried a few spoonfuls and it has a definite fruit lambic type quality to it, except a little more acetic. it has a nice barnyardy brett nose and really does smell like a spontaneously fermented beer. it has a nice acetic bite when you taste it and also a nice residual sweetness and a slight pineapple flavor... i tried a spoonful of commercial apple cider vinegar after tasting this and it tasted horrible... no comparison whatsoever. i'm really excited to use this!

here's a pic of straining it into the new jar. notice the 'krausen ring' on the jar i let it ferment in.

some gunk in the bottom of the fermenting jar... maybe this was the mother?

finished product.

it was almost exactly two months from start to finish.

Looks great! Making my mouth water.

I wonder if as that ages and drops clear if you wont end up with a mother in there? I have about an inch in the bottom of a braggs jar that has cleared and I can see a slimy goober in there now that I could not before.
 
Of course I've made vinegar!

Oh. You mean intentionally... :drunk:
corkybstewart said:
His philosophy is crappy wine makes crappy vinegar so he will spend $30-40 for good Bordeaux bottles.
Great philosophy... makes a ton of sense to me. In fact, it might even make *more* sense to spend less on a typical bottle of wine for drinking than one for acetifying, since people don't generally consume multiple bottles of the latter in a single night.

Yooper said:
Let's see- making soap ... and now ... hunting
Oh, I thought you've been hunting for a while. Was this your first year? Never would've guessed..

Just wondering: do you use the fat from the deer you kill to make any of your soap? I never thought I'd be able to personally kill a deer, but lately I've been thinking that a quick killshot in the wild must be far more ethical than the way industrially farmed animals are treated, and in a month I'm moving onto a fairly large wooded property here in Ontario, so I really think I want to start hunting. Cheaper and healthier meat is certainly a big incentive, but above all, it's an issue of ethics for me. And because of that, I'd like to use as much of the animal as possible... and if I can use the fat to make quality soap, that'd be fantastic.

Also, I noticed you said you make your own laundry detergent. What do you make it from? I find that many (probably most) commercial detergents don't clean well enough for me, even if I use a lot more than directed. So I have to ask if homemade detergent could possibly perform well enough, when so many commercial products don't even cut it for me.

MSweat said:
I keep a bottle of Bragg's around and whenever I have heartburn I do a shot, knocks my heartburn out in seconds!
Homercidal said:
I've heard Apple Cider Vinegar shots is good for heartburn, but when I tried it, it did nothing except make my mouth taste cidery.
I've heard that before, but it sounds like an unsubstantiated folk remedy, to be honest. Heartburn is caused by acid, and is often treated with a base to quickly neutralize that acid (e.g. calcium carbonate). Treating it with acid just doesn't make sense, and the specificity of apple cider vinegar REALLY makes it reek of an old wives' tale.

mr_goodwrench said:
From what I have read, the acetobacter likes an alcohol content around 5-7% and much above that can kill it.
You have a source for that? I'm not being argumentative, I just want to judge for myself if that's reliable, because it seems that people make vinegar with higher ABV bases all the time.
 
I wonder if as that ages and drops clear if you wont end up with a mother in there? I have about an inch in the bottom of a braggs jar that has cleared and I can see a slimy goober in there now that I could not before.

i'm wondering that myself.. i'm curious to see if a mother eventually forms in this bottle... looking forward to see if that porter ends up a useable malt vinegar.
 
Oh, I thought you've been hunting for a while. Was this your first year? Never would've guessed..

Just wondering: do you use the fat from the deer you kill to make any of your soap? I never thought I'd be able to personally kill a deer, but lately I've been thinking that a quick killshot in the wild must be far more ethical than the way industrially farmed animals are treated, and in a month I'm moving onto a fairly large wooded property here in Ontario, so I really think I want to start hunting. Cheaper and healthier meat is certainly a big incentive, but above all, it's an issue of ethics for me. And because of that, I'd like to use as much of the animal as possible... and if I can use the fat to make quality soap, that'd be fantastic.

Also, I noticed you said you make your own laundry detergent. What do you make it from? I find that many (probably most) commercial detergents don't clean well enough for me, even if I use a lot more than directed. So I have to ask if homemade detergent could possibly perform well enough, when so many commercial products don't even cut it for me.

You have a source for that? I'm not being argumentative, I just want to judge for myself if that's reliable, because it seems that people make vinegar with higher ABV bases all the time.

No, I've been hunting for years. I just started bow hunting about 4 years ago, though- so that's sort of new.

I just saw a great blog last night on rendering deer tallow, so it's too late for this year but it's 100% going to happen next year. I read that tallow makes a hard bar, like palm oil, and with no tallow smell in the final bar. I think a castile type soap, using olive oil and deer tallow, will be high on my list of priorities next fall!

I rarely eat anything that comes from a package, and also don't tend to eat "commercial" meat. Not just for health reasons, but for environmental and ethical concerns as well.

The laundry detergent "recipe" is here on the forum somewhere. But it boils down to 1/2 bar of soap, shaved or grated, 1 cup borax and 1 cup washing soda (NOT baking soda, but the Arm and Hammer washing soda!). I like dry laundry detergent, but for the liquid water is added and it's heated and cooled. I was using Fels-Naptha soap for my bar of soap, but now use homemade soap for that as well.

I'm not sure the aceterobacteri will "die" at a higher ABV, but what happens with wine vinegar if you don't dilute is that the vinegar is far too acetic. so I diluted my wine with some water when I made the wine vinegar.
 
I had taken that information from pretty much anecdotal information on various blogs I had read. After doing a bit more poking around on the internets, it seems that some some strains of Acetobacter can tolerate 18-20% ABV. However, according to this (apparently Turkish) site, acetobacter aceti, which I suspect is the species we are culturing from Bragg's, is good to 9-12% ABV.

I would agree that higher alcohol levels would probably lead to a vinegar that is too vinegary...

I am currently fermenting a 3/4 gallon batch of all malt beer to turn into malt vinegar. I used extra light DME and had my first indoor boil over in years! As soon as it finishes, I'll put in the new gallon 'fruit wine jar' I bought at the ASSI Market last week.
 
I just started a batch of vinegar last weekend. I used a full bottle of red wine (a blend, inexpensive but from a decent local winery). The wine was 13.5%, so I diluted with just less than an equal mount of water to around 7%. In retrospect I wish I had started with something weaker so that I didn't have to dilute so much. I added a bottle of Bragg's (the 470 or 500 mL bottle) and shook the thing up and covered it in a couple layers of cheese cloth.

The main reason I wanted to do this is so that I have a Mother started for the Strawberry-Rhubarb wine that I have going right now. I have one 6 gallon carboy that will be bottled as wine, plus a 3 gallon carboy (about 3/4 full) that will be split into Strawberry-Rhubarb Wine Vinegar and sparkling wine. I kinda want to see how a Mead Vinegar would be too.
 
mr_goodwrench said:
I am currently fermenting a 3/4 gallon batch of all malt beer to turn into malt vinegar. I used extra light DME and had my first indoor boil over in years! As soon as it finishes, I'll put in the new gallon 'fruit wine jar' I bought at the ASSI Market last week.

Me too. I had some extra runnings from an amber that I finally decided to boil and ferment just for vinegar. That was my first stovetop boil and ice bath chill ever.


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I wanted to update this as I wanted to report on my success on at least one vinegar. I took a big romaine salad to a Packers party today, and made the dressing with my homemade cider vinegar as one of the main ingredients in the viniagrette. Everyone loved the dressing, and were duly impressed with the fact it was homemade vinegar in it!

The red wine vinegar is much slower, but has a definite vinegar aroma. The malt vinegar is really good, but I don't think it's quite "done" yet.

The cider vinegar is now gone, and I need to make some more hard cider so I can make some more cider vinegar. I do have a crabapple wine that I can dilute and try, if I want to give up some of that precious wine!
 
I made some cider vinegar last year (started in march 2011), just got around to bottling it (mother was 3/4" thick) I had wondered if it sat too long, but I tried it and it is just wonderful! I just started with a simple cider (apple juice, couple cans of apple juice concentrate, yeast) and put a mother in it I found floating in our white vinegar (no idea how distilled vinegar would get a mother growing). So I've bottled that and have it in the fridge.

I kept the vinegar at room temp while it did it's job. Do I need to keep it refrigerated now to keep it from forming a new mother in the bottle?

I took my jug and poured in a few bottles of appfelwein that had been around since '08 so we'll see how it does with a slightly higher alcohol content. I couldn't remove any part of the mother since it is in a 1 gallon jug, so left the whole thing in there... we'll see.
 
Here's some pics of the vinegar I started back around Dec 11. It began as a bottle of Bragg's, a bottle of Red Wine and just under a bottle full of water to dilute the wine. The first pic is from around the middle of January, the second is from tonight. It's a little tough to see in the first pic, but you can see the Mother as a thin white disc floating diagonally near the bottom. The second is a little clearer, and shows a second culture. I'm kinda curious to see how the would continue multiplying. It's also kinda cool to see how it took the shape of the jar. It's like a square jelly disc.

I only tasted it for the first time tonight, and it tastes legit. I was a little worried about it being watery because I diluted it so much (I started with a strong wine) but it's not bad. It may be just a little watery, but it definitely has a 'bright' taste to go along with a nice tartness.

I just decanted most of it off and I'd like to make some pickled red onions tomorrow night. I'm going to leave just enough liquid in with the Mothers until I'm ready for the next batch - my strawberry-rhubarb wine which should be ready in about a week.

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nice everyone! i just tasted a vinegar i made from a porter i brewed last fall, very tasty! the pineapple vinegar i made a while back has found its way into multiple dishes and has tasted awesome in each of them. i think red wine is next on the list...
 
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