# Making vinegar



## bennypapa (Nov 11, 2012)

I'd like to make some vinegar to use for canning this fall. Do i have time?

I home brew so i can make a malt based beer but im not sure about how long it will take to convert that to vinegar nor if such a product would be suitable for canning without distilling it.

Has anybody been down this road before?

Ben


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## suitcase_sally (Mar 20, 2006)

You should not use home made vinegar for canning unless you have a way to determine the acidity of the product. Home made vinegar should only be used for making flavored vinegar for use on salads and such.


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## anahatalotus (Oct 25, 2012)

I agree with Sally. I make pineapple vinegar for flavor and tropical scented cleaning but I would not use it in canning. I really need to get around to making apple cider vinegar just to have that notch on my belt.


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## IowaLez (Mar 6, 2006)

I would not use beer as a base for vinegar; the ABV is pretty low, so the vinegar wouldn't be very strong. Use a store bought wine of at least 13% ABV. Red wine is much easier to convert to vinegar than white, so start with that to be successful and "learn the ropes". I've made many, many gallons of vinegar in the past, very successfully. However, most of the info about making it that you'll find online is massively incorrect.

When I tried to make malt vinegar from my home-brewed beer, even 7% ABV, I got a lot of mold growth on the surface, and the whole process didn't work at all! Total yuck! That's due to the low ABV of most beers. 

My red wine vinegar is very strong, waaay stronger than any vinegar you can buy in the store. When it's that strong, I personally would feel okay about using it to can with. Some vinegar "experts" online will say to dilute the finished vinegar with water to make it weaker when you go to use it for salad dressing and such, but I didn't like the results when I did that, so I use it undiluted. 

Like I said, it depends on what alcohol base you make the vinegar from. If your vinegar is stronger than the store bought, you could use it, but it may make your canned goods taste too strong. I think you could use litmus paper to test the acidity, just like is done in cheesemaking where you sometimes want to test the strength of acidity during some of the steps in the make, for the cheese to turn out properly.

If you use store bought red wine, it has metabisulphites in it, which produces sulfur dioxide gas in the beverage, to protect it against oxidizing in the bottle (from exposure to oxygen, just like oxidation of iron and steel creates rust). But the meta will kill not just yeast, but also the acetobacter bacteria that converts the alcohol into acetic acid. You want to put the wine in your blender, and run it at full speed a good many times over each day for a good 2 days, and that will exhaust the sulfur dioxide completely.

Then go buy yourself a bottle of unpasteurized, raw vinegar like the Bragg's brand, and put about an 1/8 of a cup of it into a gallon jar that has a plastic lid, not a metal one. Add the wine to it. Don't seal the container tight, leave the lid loose so gas can escape from it. The acetic acid created by the conversion of the alcohol to acetic acid will eat away at a metal lid, make it rust, and ruin the whole batch.

The jar needs to be kept in a very warm place, at least 85 degrees, near 90 is better. Protect it from sunlight - wrap a hand towel around the jar and tape it in place with masking tape to block the light.

Pretty soon, maybe in a week, you'll see this weird, whitish thin layer that looks like a veil, appear on the surface. This is the initial appearance of the "mother". Don't disturb it. It will grow very thick, with a texture and feel like wet leather. You can tell when the vinegar is getting strong, when you open the lid and stick your nose over it, it will almost overwhelm you! This leather-like stuff is a colony of the acetobacter and a few other organisms doing all the work. You can also take a little taste of it and see how strong it is during the process.

When you remove some of the vinegar to use, disturbing the jar, that top layer will fall down into the converted vinegar you leave behind. Add more wine to it, and it will once again grow that surface layer that continuously grows thicker. Anytime it falls below the surface, it will start that new, top layer again.

You have to feed the mother at regular intervals to keep it alive, so don't forget to add more to it over time. It's just like sourdough starter. Hope this helps.


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## Farmking (Oct 10, 2014)

I have some red wine vinegar and apple cider vinegar that have been sitting for about six months. The apple cider I filtered through a coffee filter and put in a jar. The red wine is still sitting with cheese cloth on top. I wasn't aware that it needs to be fed like sourdough starter. What is the best way to store it when it's done? Filter and jar it?


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## Shrek (May 1, 2002)

You can use wine gone bad as canning vinegar if you have an acidity test kit to litmus the wine turned vinegar if the acidity is high enough or distill it to a stronger level.

With as inexpensive as vinegar is, I found it much easier to just buy it in bulk.


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## Cobber (May 22, 2015)

You can use malt vinegar if you fortify it. The easiest way is to add sugar to the wort after you have drained and rinsed it and before adding the yeast. The wort should come out at about giving you 5% alcohol. Each percent of alcohol can convert to 1% acetic acid. Adding 18g of sugar per liter of liquid will give you an extra 1% potential alcohol and therefore acetic acid. So if you want 10% acetic acid in a 20L batch, you need fortify it by 5% x 18g x 20L = 1800g of sugar. That is 5% more than the wort will normally give you, 18 grams per liter and the total number of liters of wort. Sorry, I'm in Australia, don't work in imperial, only metric.

*However:*
The converting from sugar to alcohol and alcohol to acetic acid is not 100% efficient. So you will loose some depending on many factors. So if you want to be safe, you have to find a way to measure your final acid strength in the vinegar and pickled vegetables.

It also takes time, if you are looking at a batch of 20L then around 3 months of exposure to air. The temperature has to get to above 25 degrees C for most of the day. If you are only thinking of a few litres then it can be over in a month if it is kept warm enough (between 25 and 37C).


I think it is worth it because I love the flavor of the malt. You could also buy pickling vinegar and add liquid malt I suppose. 

Check out my thread in the home brewing forum on making vinegar. Feel free to ask any questions.


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## fishhead (Jul 19, 2006)

I've got a bunch of wild plums growing and am thinking of making some plum vinegar.

If I crush the plums in a collander to remove the stones would I also have to remove the skins?


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## IowaLez (Mar 6, 2006)

fishhead,

You have to ferment a sugar-containing liquid to turn it alcoholic. Then the alcohol is converted to vinegar by the acetobacter. The best option for your fruit might be to flavor already-made vinegar by putting the crushed fruit into a large jar and fill it high enough to cover the fruit, with a good quality wine vinegar and let it soak for a couple of weeks and flavor it (jar covered with lid). I just did this with some crushed cherries, using a high quality balsamic vinegar as the base, and I'm really happy with it. Of course, you keep it in the fridge during this process! Walmart actually has some extremely nice quality Italian balsamic vinegars, you can get a BIG bottle for under $10! A really good deal for such high quality!

anahatalotus, remember that cider vinegar is made with "hard" cider, not plain sugary cider. You'll have to ferment it before you can make the vinegar. You could buy hard cider at the store and use that to skip the fermentation part of the process! BUT you just have t_o make sure it doesn't contain any preservatives_, which would kill the acetobacter bacteria!

Farmking, if you're going to bottle and store the finished vinegar, pasteurize it first! If you don't, it may not keep so well. The Bragg's raw vinegar you buy in stores won't keep indefinitely. Since you won't be using it to make more vinegar from, heat treating it to kill the acetobacter is best! And filtering is optional, not absolutely necessary. It will remove sediment and stuff from the liquid, so it looks a bit more appetizing. And yes, keep it in a tightly covered jar or bottle. No metal caps or lids!

Shrek,

Wine that is_ oxidized_ is generally known as "spoiled" wine, or wine "gone bad". I spent 26 years living in No. Cali, just a stone's throw from the great wine region, the Napa Valley, and I do know my wine stuff really well! Spoiled wine doesn't equivocate to it being turned into vinegar; bottled or not, wine doesn't automatically turn to vinegar just by being old, without the acetobacter being present and getting into the wine somehow. Most often, wine is "spoiled" by bottles being stored upright, and not on their sides, which keeps the corks wet and expanded, to seal oxygen out. This does not apply to bottles with artificial corks, they don't dry out and shrink. But bottles with the twist off caps also spoil very easily, as those caps are not airtight either, and are not meant for long storage or sitting around un-drunk. Oxygen is the greatest "enemy" of any type of wine!

Most of our homes, and stores, don't have acetobacter bacteria already present to do the job of transformation from alcohol to vinegar, without inoculating the wine "artificially" with unpasteurized vinegar containing the bacteria!

In fact, the local Fareway grocery store here in town, knows me as the "Wine Nazi", similar to the fabled "Soup Nazi" and "Sushi Nazi" in NYC! It took about 4-6 weeks of my continual, patient, but relentless education of the employees, and even the checkout clerks, to stop stocking shelves with, and selling, "spoiled" wine! Every time I went in the store, which is a good 3 times a week if not more, I would go check every shelf, every bottle, every brand, and get the manager or asst manager to come over, to show them the spoiled bottles or boxes, the pale apple green white wines' color having turned darker yellow or orange and the red wines turning a dull brown burgundy. 

I explained about oxidization, the meta keeping it from spoiling and how it dissipates over time, with the eventual oxidization changing the color and making it taste bad. Now they have the stocker check the dates, colors, and make sure the inventory is rotated properly. I did it from the viewpoint that it is an excellent small chain of grocery stores here in Iowa, and their wine section should be in good order to protect that great reputation they have.

But this is Iowa, so I don't expect people to automatically know about this stuff, and yet even very good wine stores here in the Midwest, often have many spoiled bottles on shelves. The majority of people here in the region don't drink wine, and if they do, it's the overly sweet and fruity ones they choose, like boone's farm, or Moscato and pink Zin, that's typical with people who don't have an "educated" palate - when you're an experienced wine consumer, the preference for a dry wine is more common, except with a Riesling, Moscato, or Gewurztraminer, which have natural residual sugar in them. I always try to educate people so they understand wines more! My personal favorites are the white Vognier and Marlborough (New Zealand) Sauvignon Blancs - I can't drink most red wines, as the higher tannin content makes me ill.

cobber: What do you mean about adding sugar to the wort "after having drained and rinsed it"? Wort is the boiled malty liquid that is fermented into the beer! What are you draining and rinsing? The other consideration with fortifying the wort with additional sugar to make the resulting beer higher alcohol, is that beer yeasts in general can't tolerate the higher alcohol content (generally beyond 7%) that wine yeasts can, and won't fully ferment to total dryness (zero gravity) Once the alcohol content reaches a certain ABV %, it kills the yeasts! If doing that, a person might want to use one of the highly alcohol-tolerant super-yeasts used for distillation of hard liquors, or one of the fancy "Abby" ale style yeast strains, and do a special small batch of beer just for making the vinegar. If residual sugar is present, it can allow harmful bacteria and mold to grow and ruin/contaminate the alcoholic base. I had that happen in one of my malt (beer base) vinegar attempts and it was yucky just to look at it!

I'm happy to answer any further questions!


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## fishhead (Jul 19, 2006)

Thanks for the info. Would the acid level be the same without first fermenting the plums before covering them in already made vinegar?


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## jwal10 (Jun 5, 2010)

I make cider in the fall, keep in barrels and use until it gets too hard, then add some mother from last years unfiltered vinegar, usually around May. I filtered last falls vinegar a month ago, that I will use for canning this year after I use the 8 gallons from the year before. I always keep a couple gallon jugs of unfiltered raw vinegar for starter....James


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## Cobber (May 22, 2015)

Iowalez, I think I meant mash, the grains after they have been soaked, heated and kept at 68C for an hour. You pour off the liqour and ferment this, is that called wort?

Your right, not all beer yeasts will handle alcohol levels above 7% but 7% acetic acid is a pretty potent vinegar, if you try drinking it, it will blow your head off. If you want to go to 10% you can you a wine yeast, I use Vintners Harvest CY17 (cider yeast) and Safale SA05 and blend the two barley wines after fermentation is finished for added complexity in the final vinegar. I have tried a few other wine yeasts but hadnt really noticed anything specifically good about the result except for Vintner's Harvest BV 7

Description:
BV7 will both preserve and enhance the grape variety and terroir, promoting excellent flavour complexity, good wine structure and balance but especially FULL AROMATIC FLAVOUR. To appreciate the impact of BV7, split a chardonnay must, fermenting half with CL23 and the remainder with BV7 &#8211; you will be amazed at the impact of the yeast strain upon fruit concentration.

BV7 produces a wide range of low level beneficial congeners such as higher alcohols and esters and high glycerol promoting full body and structure to the wine and contributing significantly to mouth-feel, wine texture and palate intensity.


Well it certainly did that to my barley wine but in the end I decided that it was not a desirable characteristic in the vinegar.
Havent thought of using an "Abby" ale style yeast, will try that next batch. Same with the apple cider vinegar, I use a range of wine and beer yeasts, I have pretty much settled with the 2 above though.


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