WTF is vinegar? And what is its MOTHER?

what even is vinegar i mean i know it literally means sour wine so when i open up a bottle of wine but i don't drink all of it and then it starts to taste kind of sour after a few days is that vinegar well kinda at least it's the start of vinegar that is exactly what happened a few years back to the author of this book vinegar the eternal condiment by reginald smith here he is i had a co-worker that introduced me to home brewing and so i thought i could make a maple wine for maple syrup and it tasted absolutely horrible and so i left it on my counter over christmas vacation and when i came back there was a layer on top of it a gelatinous layer and looking up i realized it was a mother of vinegar smith's little discovery there was basically the same one made by ancient babylonians some 5 000 years previously and then by ancient egyptians chinese greeks basically everybody figured this out because it's simply inevitable you make some kind of sweet drink maybe a fruit juice or a wart made from grain and then as it kind of sits around yeast that are ubiquitous in the environment come in here and they eat some of the sugars and they basically poop out alcohol you have a taste and you notice that it still tastes pretty delicious and it makes you feel funny which you really like so you keep it around but then as it continues to sit a different class of microorganism from the environment settles in here a class of bacteria known as acetobacters and they eat some of the alcohol and then basically poop out acetic acid and if they're really happy they decide to settle down and build themselves a little house this is called the mother mother of vinegar is basically a big party of bacteria on the top of your wine or alcohol the acetic acid bacteria form together and they begin producing cellulose which is the same compound that makes leaves grass to provide like a environment for themselves that helps them to get air from the environment which they need to make vinegar as well as contact the alcohol in the brew which they need to make vinegar as well and if you're an ancient babylonian you maybe push this creepy layer aside to get yourself a swig of your drink that makes you feel funny you think this tastes really sour now and it's not making me feel funny anymore this sucks but i've got some bland hunk of beast over here or maybe one that tastes kind of off i wonder if i can make it taste better by pouring on some of my sour juice and indeed it does taste good and a few more happy accidents later you realize that if you leave your food in your sour juice and seal it away from air your food doesn't spoil you've pickled it in a liquid that's too acidic for other microbial life to survive and as a result you survive through the lean times when there isn't much food growing you are fruitful and multiply and you are able to pass your love of sour juice onto your children and thus vinegar conquers the world just as it conquered reginald smith's world remember that maple wine vinegar that he made accidentally i figure hey i'll just let it go better than dumping it and two months later i had a very good tasting maple vinegar so i figured hey here's something i am good at quite good actually so much so that he started his own company here supreme vinegar just outside philadelphia he makes all kinds of boutique vinegars and also supplies mother of vinegar to other vinegar makers instead of just waiting around for acetobacters in the environment to colonize your alcohol it's much faster to just drop in a hunk of mother why do they call it mother i am your mother mother of vinegar was not known to be made from bacteria until the late 19th century from lewis pasture before that they didn't know what it was they guessed it was alive but they called it a mother because they knew that if they transferred that mother from one vat of wine to another you could start another vinegar fermentation another thing that ancient people figured out through experimentation is that at some point in the vinegar making process you have to stop that is you have to seal off the vinegar from the oxygen that the acetobacters need if it's left open the air the bacteria will use up any alcohol left in the vinegar and once that's gone they don't just die they start eating the vinegar itself breaking it down until you only have water left and so over time that'll weaken the vinegar until it's non-usable or maybe even spoils you can see smith here doing various chemical tests to see if his vinegar is ready to seal off he's measuring the ph trying to get the acetic acid content to five six maybe seven percent by volume above seven percent it'll burn your mouth pretty badly so when the numbers are looking good the vinegar maker seals their product off from the air in a barrel or a bottle or something and that's when the flavor really starts to develop as it ages for months or even years as in the case of perhaps the most celebrated vinegar in the world balsamic from italy basically a sour syrup they called it balsamico because it reminded them of a balsam that is a resin taken from various plants and used to make perfumes cosmetics or medicines balms they weren't saying this vinegar is a balm but rather it's like a balm just like nobody is saying that this coffee literally contains chocolate and hazelnut but rather it's reminiscent of those things and i'm quite enjoying it thanks to the sponsor of this video trade coffee whom i'll now briefly thank trade is a way for you to discover new coffees from the top roasters you go online and take their quiz i'm feeling intermediates these days you tell them how you make your coffee what kind of roast you like i defer to you what kind of flavors do you like etc and they brew you up a match choose your delivery frequency and your matches will start showing up right on your doorstep fresh from the roaster this one is produced by an all-women co-op of growers in honduras and it sure is chocolatey and hazelnutty just like vinegar it's amazing how many different flavors you can get by producing coffee in slightly different ways you go back online and rate the coffee you got and the algorithm gets smarter and smarter at sending you coffees you'll love do us both a favor and hit the referral link below you'll get 30 off your first bag free shipping included thank you trade anyways balsamic vinegar the first solid historical mention of this stuff goes back to 16th century italy primarily the region of modena where it's still that's the primary place it's made and balsamic vinegar instead of using wine vinegar uses grape must which is pretty much boiled down grape juice which is then fermented to vinegar and not only that the most traditional bottle-like vinegar which is also very expensive is aged over at least 12 years in successively small women barrels made of different woods yeah look at these barrels no seal is a hundred percent so the vinegar slowly evaporates and reduces as it ages once a year they would move it to a smaller barrel of different wood from which to extract different flavors this is oak juniper ash cherry etc now i know what you're thinking you're thinking how is this so cheap if it's made by this potentially decades-long process well the stuff made by that process absolutely is not cheap this is not that there's a cheaper balsamic vinegar called balsamic vinegar of modena which is pretty much grape must mix with red wine vinegar and age for about 60 days and that's primarily what you get the supermarket okay so now i think i know another thing you're thinking you're thinking wait a minute is vinegar an alcoholic beverage i mean it's made from wine or beer or in the case of distilled vinegar it's made from a distilled spirit hooch the hooch can't be super high alcohol too high and no bacteria can survive in there it's got to be watered down to maybe 10 booze and then the acetobacters can get to work but regardless vinegar is always made from alcohol now there are industrial vinegars acetic acid made for industrial purposes they can do that chemically through some significantly less wholesome processes but in most countries you can't sell them as vinegar for food food grade vinegar is always made from alcohol and this fact has for centuries presented an interesting conundrum in the islamic world where intoxicants are strictly forbidden it's a matter of scripture that the prophet muhammad himself loved vinegar but to this day you can find discussions online where muslims are debating whether and which kinds of vinegar really are halal oh there's our friend reggie chiming in as he explains in his book the way vinegar is historically manufactured in the islamic world is through a process of double fermentation the juice goes in the barrel and it doesn't come out until it's vinegar there's no intermediate step in which you have a stable wine the fermentation of the sugars into alcohol can overlap somewhat with the fermentation of the alcohol into acid but at some point in the process there's going to be a lot of alcohol in the barrel and there is going to be some amount of alcohol left in the finished vinegar you want to make sure the alcohol is not completely gone but down to like between point to the point four percent i call by volume that's enough alcohol to give some flavor to the vinegar but it's not so little that the bacteria start cannibalizing the vinegar and reducing the acidity but now listen to me middle schoolers who are getting ideas don't go raiding your parents pantry trying to get buzzed off of vinegar when something has less than half a percent of alcohol in it like this does your body simply wouldn't be able to absorb the alcohol fast enough as you digested the stuff in order to make you intoxicated plus i think if you chugged a whole bunch of this you'd be seeing it again really soon but while vinegar generally requires alcohol as a precursor the process of transforming said booze can take many forms case in point reginald smith's personal favorite anecdote from the history of vinegar the french navy during the seven years war used vinegar to swab the decks of its ships which meant that some procurement officer had to go out and buy vinegar for the navy and the people won the contracts like many people who have wore contracts were not completely scrupulous and so what they tried to do is they tried to pass off wine and they would have their workers urinate in it to make it acidic that passed off as vinegar to sell to the navy and the craziest part about this story is they actually worked because it somehow that speeded fermentation maybe don't try that one at home but here's something you can try right back where we started the wine that has been left open for a few days is it vinegar not quite there are a few other chemical reactions that can make this taste sour before it really starts becoming vinegar and that process will be delayed by a class of preservatives used in wine called sulfites since ancient times wine makers have added sulfites to keep their wine from turning into vinegar exposed to air in an open bottle those sulphites will slowly break down but you can speed that process with a standard three percent drugstore solution of hydrogen peroxide about half a teaspoon per bottle of wine pour it in shake it up and after a few minutes the peroxide and the sulphites have basically destroyed each other then you got to cut your wine with an equal part of water most wine on the shelf has a high enough alcohol concentration to kill bacteria you either have to wait for some of the alcohol to evaporate off or you can dilute it then you just wait for wild acetobacters to come along it can take a little bit longer and sometimes can be less reliable but wild fermentation is how vinegar was made for much of history but the sure bet would be to seed your wine with some mother in my case i've bought some apple cider vinegar with live mother in it that's the stuff on the bottom there shake up the bottle to get the mother redistributed smith recommends about eight ounces of this for a bottle of wine cover that with some breathable stuff and a couple of weeks later your mother is on top and right under that is your vinegar keep it sealed in an airtight container in a nice dark pantry and it can last for as long as humans have and will use vinegar to make their food safer and tastier vinegar the eternal condiment also coffee the eternal beverage thanks again to trade for their sponsorship get 30 off your first bag with my link in the description now has anybody ever tried should not be

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 1,488,199

Rating: 4.9534731 out of 5

Keywords: vinegar, what is vinegar, does vinegar have alcohol, alcohol, is vinegar halal, vinegar mother, mother of vinegar, mother, what is mother, what is vinegar mother, what is mother of vinegar, supreme vinegar, how to make vinegar, how to make vinegar at home, reggie smith, reginald smith

Id: pO-L9mo06CQ

Length: 11min 44sec (704 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 05 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/KidA001]

Is what they're calling the "mother" actually a pellicle? From making Kombucha there is a large misconception that this is called the SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) and that you need it to start a new batch of kombucha.

This is wrong however, the SCOBY is in the kombucha liquid itself and you only need the right ratio of an existing komucha batch to start a new batch, you do not need the pellicle.

When they pan to his mother batches that he's selling you can see they're just liquid, no "mother" or pellicle.

Everyone get off my lawn immediately.

[u/TheProtractor]

So this dude accidentally made vinegar once and then started a vinegar making busuiness? Nice

[u/hot_grey_earl_tea]

The anecdote about peeing in the wine to pass it off as vinegar and inadvertently speeding up fermentation, funny shit.

[u/NavySasquatch]

Just started getting into pickling and fermenting and I had started to wonder hoe in the hell do you make vinegar. Thabks for clearing it up, hell of a video.

[u/cxbu]

Thanks. Fascinating

[u/flamingponypro]

As someone who's allergic to sulfites, the part about putting hydrogen peroxide in wine/cider to eliminate the sulfites was fascinating! Does anyone have more info on this process?

[u/nolotusnote]

Fuck.

Is this my new Covid sourdough starter?

[u/Horse_Bacon_TheMovie]

Cool video, every time I saw the host I kept thinking "I wonder what Marc Maron is up to these days...why did I stop listening?"

[u/MitchfromMich]

So for somebody allergic to sulfites but loves wine, add a teaspoon of hydrogen peroxide?

Good tip