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How to make cider vinegar (sub-plot, any vinegar)

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  • How to make cider vinegar (sub-plot, any vinegar)

    Vinegar is diluted acetic acid; in cooking and preserving I’ve read that a concentration of 4.5% of acid in the vinegar is desirable, that’s what I aim for. You make acetic acid out of alcohol, so you need wine, beer or cider to start. They say it goes roughly 1% ABV (of your wine/beer/etc) to 1% acetic acid (in the final vinegar), I find mine doesn’t, maybe some of the alcohol just stays as alcohol in the vinegar, but to be reasonably certain of getting 4.5%+ acid I aim for 6.5%ABV in the cider I make.

    So this note is about making cider vinegar. Most of the stuff will apply to wine vinegar.

    Be aware before you start, you need to keep the liquid being turned into vinegar at around 18°C or more. I think you may be able to get away a few degrees below, but I’ve wasted time in the winter trying to make vinegar in ambient temperatures. It needs air circulating over the surface of the liquid (some, and I think commercial plants always, blow air or oxygen through the liquid. Unnecessary if you don't mind waiting 8 weeks) - I think this creates a contamination risk, be careful with your sterilising brewing equipment.

    Overview:
    1. Make cider
    2. Get rid of CO2, inoculate with bacteria, expose to air (not bugs)
    3. Wait approx. 1 week for each % ABV of original alcohol (after ‘mother’ has formed)
    4. Job done, bottle it and use it straight away

    Special equipment needed:
    (1) a large-necked jar in glass or ceramic that’s safe to use with food/acid/alcohol. I started with an old sweets jar a chum gave me. You can get a posh ceramic 3L jar from Amazon, or I think the best ones are 10L glass drinks dispensers (like they use in hotels for juice at a breakfast buffet) normally available in Costco for about £18-£25.
    (2) Bacteria: Acetobacter – able to convert alcohol and oxygen to acetic acid. Get this in a bottle of natural vinegar that hasn’t been pasteurised or treated with preservatives. Buy a small (300ml+) bottle of natural vinegar “including the mother” (explained later) from a health-food shop or online.

    1. Make cider – there are lots of recipes in the forum, so I’ll skip that here and try to put in a link http://www.winesathome.co.uk/forum/s...22-Turbo-Cider. I’ll assume you’ve made a basic turbocider (cider made from cartons of apple juice & sugar) at 6.5%ABV or above and it’s sitting in the primary FV, fermentation has stopped, but let’s assume it’s sitting on the trub and cloudy.

    2.1 I make 20 Lit + at a time and bottle for drinking & cooking all but 10 L I'm going to use to make vinegar. Bottle first (priming as need be) and now syphon the remaining 10 Lit off the trub into a clean carboy (NO priming). Shake the carboy hard to get rid of all the CO2, I’ve read that CO2 inhibits the development of the bacteria we need in the next step. It may do, I think I have an example of that as a problem (picture later).

    2.2 Pour the cider into the vinegar jar. It doesn’t matter if it’s cloudy, mine always clears later because I make clear cider but I doubt if there will be many complaints about cloudy vinegar.

    2.3 The bacteria behave a bit like yeast – they need temperatures over 18°C . A lot of the articles on the web talk about getting bacteria naturally by leaving exposed and quite a few encourage insects and bugs, I don't advocate this. Buy a bottle of natural cider vinegar (with mother) and add to the cider the contents of the bottle of natural vinegar, including the sludge at the bottom (mother), this should have enough bacteria to start. I don't think it goes off easily, my first bottle was very old & dusty. On your second batch, you can use your own vinegar & mother from your first go. So you only need to buy on the first run.

    2.4 Leave the top of the jar open. Don’t put a lid on, this isn’t yeast – we need fresh air to be in contact with the surface of the cider. But keep out bugs. I put a single layer of muslin over the jar opening and keep it in place with a ‘necklace’ of 3-looped bath-plug chain. Both the muslin & chain came from a local hardware shop.

    Here’s where we’ve got to:

    vj2.jpg

    The batch in this photograph did not have the CO2 shaken out and it took a long time to get going. You can see the CO2 bubbles on the side of the vessel. That’s a 10 Lit jar from Costco.

    Mother

    A note about mother. Acetobacter works with oxygen to convert alcohol into acetic acid. In normal circumstances the oxygen is available at the surface and the bacteria needs to be there, at the surface. Acetobacter grows a mat of cellulose which floats (precariously) on the surface, it looks like a gooey grey-white jelly in cider vinegar which should get about 5mm thick. This is mother. It sinks, given the smallest excuse (but will re-form, the old one lying at the bottom of the vessel) and breaks up from time to time. The residue of this mat, the mother, that gets into the bottle of natural vinegar you buy will be just bits of this at the bottom of the bottle. You aren’t particularly interested in the cellulose, but that’s the evidence that you’ve got live bacteria in the vinegar. Here are some additional images of mother.

    mother forming.jpg --- Mother beginning to form after 5-10 days in warm conditions
    vgar100410a.jpg --- Mother almost fully covering (will grow in thickness)
    there goes mother2.jpg --- Mother sinking after tiny knock, sets the process back a week or two

    With vinegar, you want the mother to grow. If it sinks, your process slows down while another one grows. You don’t have to put mother in your final ‘table vinegar’ just strain it out, though it may start again in the bottle (unless you pasteurize or otherwise inhibit).

    It also needs fresh air. That means you get a smell (opinion in my household differs, I think it’s OK, I am alone).

    I don’t know how airborne Acetobacter is, but I think it is very airborne. At least as capable of contaminating your brewing as wild yeast is capable of getting onto fruit. I make my vinegar in a different room from all brewing and use different utensils, brushes, etc. I’ve read of publicans who won’t allow a bottle of vinegar in their pub for fear of contamination and a few other stories. I believe if you leave cider in an open vessel it will ‘turn’ quite soon – compelling evidence that acetobacter is all around us and having a vinegar jar open is adding to the density of bacteria in your house-space. So best assume if you make it, everything is contaminated, and be extra careful with sterilising equipment.

    3. The mother should form in 5-10 days if warm enough and you have ventilation to the surface. I made a batch of cider very acidic by accident (it was lower than pH3.8 and I added 3 tsp of citric acid to 10L). The mother was never properly formed and after 10 weeks I noticed a dark fungal colony and threw it away. So I think normal wine/cider acidity is also important. You won’t see much going on other than the mother getting fat (to about 5-7mm). Allow 1 week per 1% ABV from the time when the mother fully covers the surface then test the vinegar. I use a Richies wine & beer acid test kit – but you have to adjust your test for the fact that the vinegar is 10 times more acidic than wine. So make your sample 0.5ml of vinegar instead of 5ml must… otherwise it seems to work fine.

    Bottle your vinegar when it’s ready, keep a jam-jar of the dregs & sludge for the next one.

    Of the things you can do with it, we use it all the time for salad dressing but pickled shallots, herrings, piccalilli – it’s all better (in my opinion) for using cider vinegar, a more flavoured, softer taste than the traditional vinegars.

    herring.jpg

    Problems:
    1. Very thin mother or none forming: possibly not enough air available, using a wine bottle with a wad of cotton wool as I've seen in some instructions does this (my first attempt). Or temperature too low, acidity too high, too much CO2.
    2. After bottling another mother forms: this can be OK, it may be just continuing the process in the bottle. However, if the bottle is (say) half-full and has been left a long time (6 months or more at a guess) - another type of bacteria may have started to work. This converts Acetic acid to water and CO2 (a cunning circle is thus closed, that's what the apple tree started with). Best throw it away, unless you want to titrate again, it may taste fine, but not have the required acid to pickle and preserve.
    Now bottling 20DJs of 2013 red and making room to rack 5 carboys of 2014 red to the DJs where they can wait for another winter.
    Thank goodness for eBay! (local cache of DJs)

  • #2
    That's a great tutorial Toulouse, thanks for taking the effort to do it.

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    • #3
      Yeah real good work. I for one will be giving it a go. But being so tight, shall wake we got some apples going spare.

      Are cookers or eaters better?
      Gluten free, caffeine free, dairy free, fat free – you gotta love this red wine diet!

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      • #4
        ..and what a good piece of glassware!! (first pic)
        Gluten free, caffeine free, dairy free, fat free – you gotta love this red wine diet!

        Comment


        • #5
          I've no idea on the difference between cookers & eaters, as I always cheat and use (clear) apple juice. But the forums, blogs and articles seem to point towards a selection of different apples giving the better flavour for cider - and I should think that carries over in vinegar. Some crab apples and special cider varieties also get a mention, though crab apples are high in pectin, so if you don't want cloudy, make adjustments.
          Now bottling 20DJs of 2013 red and making room to rack 5 carboys of 2014 red to the DJs where they can wait for another winter.
          Thank goodness for eBay! (local cache of DJs)

          Comment


          • #6
            Originally posted by ToulouseLePlot View Post
            I've no idea on the difference between cookers & eaters, as I always cheat and use (clear) apple juice. But the forums, blogs and articles seem to point towards a selection of different apples giving the better flavour for cider - and I should think that carries over in vinegar. Some crab apples and special cider varieties also get a mention, though crab apples are high in pectin, so if you don't want cloudy, make adjustments.
            Apples basically break down into 4 groups, Sweet, sharp, bitter sweet and bitter sharp. True cider apples are bitter sweet and bitter sharp, though with most ciders, it's mainly bitter sharp, as the bitter sweet varieties are, by all accounts, the hardest ones to grow/crop. It would be relatively easy to make a faux version of the juice, by adding a little acid to make a sweet juice sharp, some tannin to sweet juice to give bitter sweet and tannin and acid to sweet for bitter sharp - as it depends on where you are, as to which are likely to be the dominant varieties grown in the area.

            Or of course, as I expect that the quality of the vinegar (cider vinegar that is), is likely to depend on the quality of the cider, you could just get as many different varieties as you can lay your hands on, then think about extra acid and tannin to vary things a bit. I'd have thought that pectolase is a must, when it comes to making the cider stage, irrespective of the apples used, as most jam making pectin is derived from apples. Equally, I'd guess that you could also do this like with Normandy cider, and pulp the apples, leave them to oxidise a bit, then press them for the juice, then add the pectolase to do it's stuff, while you're waiting for the juice to oxidise a bit more for a darker colour, before pitching yeast to make the cider.

            There's also the "too sugar, or not too sugar" factor. Do you add some, so that the base cider is higher alcohol, which would logically produce a more acidic vinegar once the bacteria have done their thing, or leave it "as is" so you get a milder/smoother tasting vinegar.

            Also, most so called "crab apples" aren't true crab apples, but domesticated types that have reverted to their natural form, given that there's little control of water and nutrition for the tree's. The same applies to ornamental varieties. They can also be used but are often higher in pectin and especially tannin, which gives them their distinctive bitter taste (and gives rise to the myth of toxicity - though given the presence of cyanides in the pips/stones of all fruit like that, it might not be completely unfounded...... after all, cyanide must have been obtained from somewhere when it was first discovered)

            Wizard ideas about vinegar though TLP. Been thinking of whether it's worth getting one of those wide mouthed carboys from Brouwland and a bottle of "mother", as I've got plenty of mead that could be converted.....
            Women will never be equal to men until they can walk down the street with a bald head and a beer gut, and still think they are sexy.

            Some blog ramblings

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            • #7
              bitter sweet/sharp

              "It would be relatively easy to make a faux version of the juice, by adding a little acid to make a sweet juice sharp, some tannin to sweet juice to give bitter sweet and tannin and acid to sweet for bitter sharp" -

              I'm a newb to this great site: last October I made some cider (first attempt) from a variety of dessert and cooking apples as this was all I could get hold of- I has a SG of about 1050 which fermented to 1.000 in five days - I bottled it in 2 ltr PET bottles adding a small amount of sugar for carbonation - tasted some recently and though 'ok' seems to lack what I presume must be these tannins/acids - is there a way I can redeem this by adding acid/tannin now - if so, how and what do I use?

              ps: will be trying out the Turbo cider recipe

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