Yesterday I got a happy surprise! As I was about to throw out my failed first attempt at making white vinegar, I gave it a taste. Turned out it'd come up sharp after all!
Making plain vinegar for household cleaning and canning is another of my many penny-pinching schemes. I estimate that a gallon of homemade vinegar, made from cheap granulated sugar, costs about $0.30 a gallon versus more than $3 a gallon at the store for white distilled vinegar. Plus I help Mother Earth by reusing my jugs.
The process for making vinegar is no mystery. You basically let air into alcohol to spoil it on purpose. Or you can help the process along by mixing in some unpasteurized vinegar, what they call a "mother."
But I found no instructions online for making plain white vinegar. Posts on homemade vinegar are mostly for wine, cider, and flavored vinegars. Not what I needed.
So what I did was create a roughly 10% solution of sugar in water by weight by mixing 1.5 C white sugar into 12 C (3/4 gallon) of water. (That's a 1/8 ratio by volume.) Then I added a tsp of bread yeast, taped a napkin over the opening to keep bugs out, and let it ferment about 3 weeks. Finally, I added some Bragg's unpasteurized cider vinegar and left it alone another month or so.
When I first tasted it a couple weeks after adding the mother, it seemed too sweet and not vinegary enough. I was tempted to throw out my failure, but I was busy and left it where it sat. Yesterday I was organizing the kitchen and about to throw it for reals out when, as I wrote above, I sampled it one last time. Sharp and oddly delicious! Perfect for cleaning or cooking.
A friend of mine who's expert in home fermenting tells me there's an easier way. She advises mixing some of my current batch at 1/3 straight into my 10% by weight (1/8 by volume) sugar solution and letting it do its thing. Should be much faster. I'll give it a try.
BTW, that picture at top is a Chinese classic, "The Vinegar Tasters." Check out the link. Interesting allegory.
