Mother of Invention

They say necessity is the mother of invention; I say it's vinegar.

Somewhere in the deep past, humans discovered fermentation with all of it's delightful end products. Sometime after that, they must have overlooked some wine and left to itself in a forgotten corner, it turned to vinegar.

Did our ancestors toss out the sour wine in disgust? No, they found 1001 uses for the product, everything from pickles and salads to laundry and weed killing.

On the homestead, vinegar is a great lazy person project--mix it up and forget it for 3 or more months.

This winter I decided to try making honey vinegar and a small batch of apple cider vinegar. In previous research, I was interested to learn that the first step in making vinegar is making alcohol. This would be a lot easier if I drank alcohol but I was starting from scratch so the process takes longer.

For both kinds of vinegar, I used the mother from a bottle of Bragg's Apple Cider Vinegar. The mother is the scummy stuff that settles out when the bottle sits for awhile; it is cellulose and bacteria which through the magic of chemistry will turn your alcohol into vinegar.

The apple version was made using apples from our trees, cut up, mashed, and hand squeezed and strained. I added the mother and covered the jar with cheesecloth (REAL cheesecloth. I found in a previous attempt that the stuff that passes as cheesecloth is too loosely woven and the end product is fruit flies).

The honey concoction used 1 part honey to 8 parts water by weight plus the mother.

Since vinegar needs warm temperatures, I kept both jars near the stove for 3 months.

Today I strained out the flora and fauna that had grown and tasted both. The apple cider vinegar has a fairly strong flavor, the honey less so but both qualify as vinegar in my book. I wouldn't use either in canning as the acidity needs to be certain but for other culinary uses they should be fine.

About one hour of preparation and 3 months of total disregard--my kind of undertaking.