vinegar making

[hedgerow pete]

i understand the basics, wine to vinegar = white or ed wine vinegar

malt vinegar is beer to vinegar etc.

does anyone know further details,

what i was thinking is making malt vinegar which is beer to vinegar, but at what percent alcohol should i be looking for, beer or home brew is normally around 3.6% to 5% , wines can be any where fron 10% to 26%, what does the alc volume give to the vinegars charactures,

the same is also asked on cider, now i cant stand the stuff myself, yuck!! but to turn it to vinegar is a great way to make use of it again what alc levels are we looking for

and lastly as we are looking at making a few gallons of each at the most, whats the chances of buying the cheap and nasty asda home beer , its 3% i think or less but its 25p a can or it used to be, i could aslo buy a large 2 litre bottle of nasty cider and just turn that to vinegar instead of drinking the fowl stuff,

so any vinegar makers out there or people who know where to look

 

[priono]

Hi what i read in ben turners book, if i remember properly, the initial wine should not be more than 6-8 % which you achieve by adding water. let it a day outside to catch some yeast and off you go. oxygen exposition is good during fermentation

my beetroot wine got spoiled, wasnt good anyway and it turned into vinegar which actually wasnt bad at all

 

[alanf]

If you're making it from bought alcoholic drinks, remember that's alcohol you've paid duty and VAT on where vinegar as far as I know is zero rated for VAT. For pickling I use Sainsburys basics malt vinegar at 13p a pint and add spice. Only home brew or waste booze is going to compete on price. That said, many top restaurants make their own wine vinegar from the remains of bottles returning to the kitchen because it's better than the basic stuff they can buy.

If commercial vinegar has a strength quoted it's usually 5%. If that's by weight, then because acetic acid has a molecular weight (60) higher than alcohol (ethanol at 46) the equivalent alcohol is about 3.8% if you get 100% yield but in the kitchen you have evaporation and less than perfect conversion. What does the job is a group of bacteria called Acetobacter. They are everywhere so you might get lucky just leaving an open container but if you can find unpasteurised vinegar that's probably a better starter. Otherwise, all you need is something alcoholic diluted to around 5% strength in the case of wines, a place at steady room temperature to ferment it and time. Unlike brewing it's open to the air, just keep flies and muck out. Several sites repeat the basic procedure if you Google something like 'vinegar making'.

 

[hedgerow pete]

yes there are several sites i have read through and all are too glib about the meathod as they are mainly yank websites

http://www.themadfermentationist.com/2010/02/making-maltbeer-vinegar.html
is about average.

what i needed to know is the alc levels and the reasons behind them, untill you mentioned it i did not realise there was a difference between the types of alc,

what i was thinking of was reusing the spent grains but no hops from a beer brew and then adding some sugar or liquid malt extract to top it up slightly, and from there brewing a pour quality beer for drinking but would/could make a great malt vinegar base.

cider vinegar is easy you just pour a live vinegar into a barrel of the stuff and level it for three months, but again at what alc levels, you need alc to make vinegar but to much then acts as a preservative to prevent it happening,

 

[Frisbee]

All alcohol in drinks eventually degrades into acetic acid. The good cider vinegars have a high acetic acid content almost impossible to reproduce through home made cider so I wouldn't have thought you need to water down wine too much!.......please feel free to correct me on this, I got all my information from a small scale cider producer, small scale but still earnt a living at it. His finished dry was 8.5% but the vinegar was about 5%. If you have access to raw cider vinegar....preferably with the mother, then a drop of that will act as a starter. I have some, I'm sure we could arrange a transfer if you needed some.

Frisbee

 

[hedgerow pete]

cheers Frisbee, thanks for the ideas. the general plan was to try to make a few gallon of each as a trial and then to see like the wine making that i do what suits me best.

i am working on a basic beer so i can organise a malt vinegar trial, i have yet to sort out a decent enough beer recipe as yet but some thing will come along.

 

[drstitson]

HRP - you mean you don't already have some live cider vinegar hanging around for the chooks???? you may find fellow allotmenteers (or horsey people) have some handy for you to snaffle as a mother. otherwise you can find it on ebay - around £6 for 500ml.

 

[Finman]

.
It meanst to aroma too what kind of vinegar bacterium you have.

I have never heard that some one makes his own vinegar.
Actully it happens when you give oxygen to the alcohol. Afull.

 

[hedgerow pete]

i was going to buy a litre bottle of apple juice vinegar with mother in it from fleabay as the starter.

i was thinking of setting up a small barrel at the allotment well away from the beer and wine at home to turn the vinegar, the new orleans method seems to be the way to go i think

 

[drstitson]

if you've got time on your hands (12+ years) and a battery of 7 barrels, in varying woods and decreasing sizes, why not try your hand at balsamic?

(BTW i don't think you'll qualify for protected denomination in your neck of the woods, particularly if you use 2nd hand blue barrels for the job!!!)

 

[jenkinsbrynmair]

Don't know about mother - usually find that getting mother in law to stare at a bottle of wine for half an hour does the trick

 

[Frisbee]

Don't know about mother - usually find that getting mother in law to stare at a bottle of wine for half an hour does the trick

The mother is the name for a jellified (pectin) mass which half floats in natural vinegar, it is a teeming mass of vinegar bacteria. I've only seen it in cider vinegar as that is the only natural vinegar I've had anything to do with. The stuff you buy from supermarkets/animal health etc will certainly not have the mother in it and has also probably been heat treated in some way thereby destroying the useful bacteria.

Frisbee

 

[hedgerow pete]

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/APPLE-CID...ural_AlternativeTherapies&hash=item414f043e24

this is what i was looking at as the starter culture.

i was going to use it for all the different vinegars, its the only one i have found that has not been pasturised that is avalible to buy, there are a few others on fleabay, its that or find an artisane vinegar producer and buy some of them