The Community Exchange

Making vinegar could be considered a labor of love - or a lesson in patience!  >:)

In our case, we start with making the wine.  This takes anywhere from 6 months to a year because we don't use any additives or chemicals to rush the process. 

Once we have the wine, we need a large quantity of "mother" and vinegar from our last batch in order to start a new one.  This, of course, makes less vinegar available for other purposes, and if we want to increase output, we have even Less available to use.

The conversion from wine to vinegar takes 3 to 6 months, depending on a lot of factors, but mostly temperature.

We use 6 gallon food-grade containers to make our wine vinegars.  We tried making a 30 gallon batch, but for our situation can't keep it warm enough to convert in a reasonable amount of time.

One gallon jars are often used for speciality vinegars - like raspberry wine vinegar, malt vinegar, etc. 

Freshly converted vinegar doesn't usually smell all that great - but the enzymes and bacteria are fresh and active and perfect for creating more vinegar. 

For those vinegars that are going on to be used at the table, we allow it to sit out of the mother in a warm, dark location for up to a year longer.  Tasting it once in a while to check flavors is half the fun!

We hope you get as much fun and benefit from making your own vinegar as we do...