Vinegar question

[ORChick]

This thread made me curious, so I did a little search and came up with this article. It discusses the difference between real fruit vinegar and fruit-flavored vinegar. Here's part of it:

The old-fashioned way to make fruit vinegar is to press fresh fruit juice and ferment it into wine. Next, the wine is made into vinegar by adding what is known as a mother. This ghostlike mass includes a special kind of bacteria, called acetobacters, that convert the alcohol into acetic acid. What's left is the essence of the fruit brightened by a tangy bite. The process takes from six months to three years.
Grapes traditionally are used for vinegar. But just about any fruit -- and some vegetables -- can be made into vinegar, as Erwin Gegenbauer has proved. At his craft vinegar brewery in Vienna, Austria, he makes about 40 kinds of fruit vinegars including apricot, blueberry, elderberry, sour cherry and tomato. Much as a jam maker preserves the flavors of summer, Gegenbauer told me he wants to "preserve the flavor of the fruit by turning it into vinegar."
* * *
When it comes to making fruit vinegar, a common adage might apply: Don't try it at home. The process is long and laborious, and there are very few recipes or books for aspiring do-it-yourselfers....

"Don't try it at home"? Ha! Words not intended for this crowd....

Unfortunately it's not much of a how-to article, but perhaps it will assist in your search for answers.

IMHO the hard part is making the fruit (or other) wines, if too much sugar is there the yeast will die,killed by the alcohol it produced leaving a sweet taste. The lacto-bacteria feeds on the alcohol converting it to acetic acid but it is hard to get a starter going in a high alcohol product I have been told that the real masters get the yeast fermentation started and then add the lacto-bacteria so both fermentations are going on at the same time. The method appears to be a closely held secret. I have tried many times and always failed!
what I do is get a small batch of apple cider and add the mother to that as the L- fermentation goes on I feed the mother with the wine slowly at first and add more and more wine as the volume of the vinegar increases. you can draw off the vinegar a little at a time and finish it seperate from the main batch. if the main batch is too apple to suit you start feeding the saample with wine. Warning this can take over your whole wine celler and keep you buying containers! You have to decide for yourself when enough is enough. There are tons of wine making sites on the internet and most will sell you a DIY kit.
WARNING most commercial wines contain preservatives to prevent them from turning to vinegar. I would not use them. good luck and I will answer what I can~gd

If you have access to a mother-of-vinegar, or unpasteurized vinegar you can make wine vinegar from commercial wine. The sulfites will keep it from "turning" naturally, but adding a vinegar mother or a cup or so of natural vinegar will kick start the process. Your mother and/or your natural vinegar needn't necessarifly be from wine vinegar. I made "fool proof" ACV, and used some of the finished vinegar to innoculate both red and white wine. Since then I have used the finished vinegar to continue the process. There is, naturally, less and less apple in each stage of the process. As to fruit vinegar, I have never tried it. But there is no reason why treating any stone fruit or berry in the same way as apple shouldn't make a very satisfactory vinegar. I have never heard of citrus vinegar, but if I had sufficient fruit around I might be tempted to experiment. Just because it has never been done before (or you or I have never heard of it) is no reason to give up, thinking it can't be done. I would probably add some natural vinegar to the citrus juice to give it a head start, and see what happens. Good luck.

 

[~gd]

This thread made me curious, so I did a little search and came up with this article. It discusses the difference between real fruit vinegar and fruit-flavored vinegar. Here's part of it:


"Don't try it at home"? Ha! Words not intended for this crowd....

Unfortunately it's not much of a how-to article, but perhaps it will assist in your search for answers.

IMHO the hard part is making the fruit (or other) wines, if too much sugar is there the yeast will die,killed by the alcohol it produced leaving a sweet taste. The lacto-bacteria feeds on the alcohol converting it to acetic acid but it is hard to get a starter going in a high alcohol product I have been told that the real masters get the yeast fermentation started and then add the lacto-bacteria so both fermentations are going on at the same time. The method appears to be a closely held secret. I have tried many times and always failed!
what I do is get a small batch of apple cider and add the mother to that as the L- fermentation goes on I feed the mother with the wine slowly at first and add more and more wine as the volume of the vinegar increases. you can draw off the vinegar a little at a time and finish it seperate from the main batch. if the main batch is too apple to suit you start feeding the saample with wine. Warning this can take over your whole wine celler and keep you buying containers! You have to decide for yourself when enough is enough. There are tons of wine making sites on the internet and most will sell you a DIY kit.
WARNING most commercial wines contain preservatives to prevent them from turning to vinegar. I would not use them. good luck and I will answer what I can~gd

If you have access to a mother-of-vinegar, or unpasteurized vinegar you can make wine vinegar from commercial wine. The sulfites will keep it from "turning" naturally, but adding a vinegar mother or a cup or so of natural vinegar will kick start the process. Your mother and/or your natural vinegar needn't necessarifly be from wine vinegar. I made "fool proof" ACV, and used some of the finished vinegar to innoculate both red and white wine. Since then I have used the finished vinegar to continue the process. There is, naturally, less and less apple in each stage of the process. As to fruit vinegar, I have never tried it. But there is no reason why treating any stone fruit or berry in the same way as apple shouldn't make a very satisfactory vinegar. Excuse me but are you saying to just add fruit(or fruit juice) without yeast fermentation to convert the sugars to alcohol? That sounds a lot like the fake vinegar that is made by infusing regular vinegar with fruit to me, just asking to clear up the point~gdt I have never heard of citrus vinegar, but if I had sufficient fruit around I might be tempted to experiment. Just because it has never been done before (or you or I have never heard of it) is no reason to give up, thinking it can't be done. I would probably add some natural vinegar to the citrus juice to give it a head start, and see what happens. Good luck.

I have made orange vinegar from orange juice after alcohol fermentation, the orange 'wine' didn't do much for me and the orange vinegar got used up in a sweet n sour glaze for duck now that was good!~gd

 

[ORChick]

I have only made vinegar "from scratch" using apples, and so cannot speak from experience in regard to other fruits. However I *imagine* the process would be the same. Freshly pressed, unpastuerized apple juice will, given time and exposure to air, turn to alcohol, and then to vinegar all on its own, without any input from me or you; it is *fool proof* - nature does the work. One might wish to add yeast, and fuss about with the process, if one wanted to drink the intermediary hard cider - what is formed when it is left to its own devices is not my idea of a pleasurable drink . However, if the desired end result is vinegar then nothing need be done but put the juice in a clean, non-reactive container, cover it lightly to keep out dust and insects, and leave it alone for several months. For other fruit (just to be sure), or for pastuerized juice, or for wine with sulfites adding some unpastuerized natural vinegar or mother-of-vinegar witll ensure that the proper aceto bacteria are in the mix. My original wine vinegar was made with a bottle of red wine + a cup of my home made ACV. Subsequent batches have been made using this original "red wine with a bit of apple" vinegar. White (or more correctly "rose") wine vinegar was made with a bottle of white wine and a cup of homemade red wine vinegar. These were all "real" vinegars, and not "fake vinegar that is made by infusing regular vinegar with fruit".

Here is some information of the subject: http://www.karlonia.com/2008/02/11/how-to-make-vinegar/

"Although wine making can be a tricky process, using grapes or other fruits to make vinegar is actually pretty easy, as this article by Kristie Leong points out. As long as you can obtain some kind of unpasteurized vinegar solution to use as a starter culture, a suitable container, some fruit juice, and any other ingredients you might want to add for flavoring, youre good to go.

The only difficult part might be the waiting time required to allow the vinegar to oxidize to the desired strength, but you can compensate for this by making larger quantities to store for later use. Meanwhile, the chemical formula and molecular bonding structure for acetic acid, the active ingredient in vinegar, can be found in the upper left corner of the post.

Why settle for store bought vinegar when you can make it fresh in your own home? The chemical reaction needed to make vinegar is the oxidation of an alcohol (oxidation is simply the addition of oxygen to a chemical group). The simplest way to do this is to convert a sugar into alcohol and then oxidize the alcohol to create vinegar. One of the easiest sources of sugar to use for the fermentation process is fruit juice. Here are easy instructions on how to make vinegar in your own kitchen at home:

Things Youll Need:
A large glass container with a wide mouth. Dont use metal or plastic as the acid can interact with these materials and ruin your vinegar.
Fresh fruit juice. The fruit juice you select should be free of additives or preservatives. Fresh apple or grape juice are good choices.
A bottle of unfiltered vinegar. (You can purchase this at a health food store.) This is a source of bacteria for the fermentation process.

How to Make:
Lay your clean, glass container on the table.
Pour about a quart of the unpasteurized, unfiltered vinegar into the glass jar.
Add an equal amount of your chosen fresh fruit juice.
Mix the two ingredients thoroughly and place the container into a warm, dark place. The temperature should be between 75 and 85 degrees in the storage area.
Taste your vinegar periodically until its the appropriate strength for your particular taste. This process may take up to 4-6 months to be complete, but remember to check it periodically to assess its taste.
Once the appropriate vinegar strength is achieved, you can package it into bottles.

What could be easier than this? Plus, youll have the thrill of knowing you made it yourself.

What kind of fruit juice works best for making vinegar? This depends on the type of flavor you want your vinegar to have. By using grapes or grape juice, you create wine vinegar. If you use apple juice, youll end up with cider vinegar."

 

[Ldychef2k]

That's perfect. Thank you. Peach vinegar, here we come.

 

[ORChick]

Ldychef2k, please keep us updated on your peach vinegar

I take issue with the last paragraph in the above article I quoted: I suppose that vinegar made from grapes, just plain grapes allowed to ferment by themselves, like apple juice, could possibly be called wine vinegar. But I would call it "grape vinegar". Wine vinegar, IMO, is made from finished (and drinkable) wine, though not necessarily the expensive stuff.

 

[Blackbird]

Are you kidding me??

 

[ORChick]

Are you kidding me??

??????

To whom/what are you referring?

 

[FarmerDenise]

Since the grapes first have to turn into wine, before they turn into vinegar, it would still be wine vinegar.
Just like we don't call it apple vinegar, but apple cider vinegar, because the apples have to turn into an alcoholic beverage: hard cider, before turning to vinegar.