Home Brewed Vinegar

With all those apple peels left over from the apple grunt, I decided to finally try my hand at making vinegar.  I've been itching to do this for awhile and finally emptied the enormous bottle of rice wine vinegar we had, so I had the perfect container for it.

I combined the instructions from Wild Fermentation and The Herbal Home Remedy Book.  This meant that I put the peels, water and evaporated cane juice in the jar and added a bit of Bragg's apple cider vinegar (with "the mother") to get things started right.  And that was really all there was to it!  Now we wait...

It's been about a week and there's some definite bubbly action going on.  It also smelled initially like sweet cider, but is now smelling more like a sweet wine with some acidic notes.  I'm exactly sure how I'll know it's done, I suppose when it smells like vinegar and not like wine.  At some point I'll strain out the juice and removed the peels, then let the liquid continue to vinegar-ize until it's nice and zippy.  I can't wait to have our own home-brewed vinegar.  We've also got a fresh pineapple sitting on the counter that may be destined for a batch of pineapple vinegar!