Discussion - Spirits, Essential Oils, Vinegar

Would you like to exchange your experiences about spirits, essential oils and vinegar with other participiants? Please observe our forum rules (see Helpful tips for use).

June 2018:

It has now been an unbelievable 16 years (!) since the last major change to the website and forums. When you think that two to three years are an eternity for the Internet sector, that is really something. In any case, there has been so much going on in terms of technology that it has become urgently necessary to completely redesign not only the forums, but also the entire website, from scratch and bring the programming up to date. Naturally, along with this we also introduced various new features; for example it was high time we allowed pictures to be uploaded with a forum post too or enabled users to subscribe to the forums via RSS feeds. And of course we have subsequently included pictures that are saved on external websites and were then integrated here using an img tag, so that no valuable information is lost. In any case, we hope you continue to have fun swapping experiences and trying things out.

Juni 2002:

At this point, we would first like to extend a big thank-you to all the users of our specialist questions for their lively involvement. Without you, we could never have developed such an informative and high-quality reference guide in such a short time (the first post dates from April 8, 1999). The large number of posts and high numbers of visitors made it necessary for us to develop the specialist questions ourselves using PHP and MySQL (at last no more annoying advertising banners!). During the course of this, we have hopefully introduced several improvements.

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So, that’s it. We hope you have a lot of fun swapping experiences, reading, posting and naturally also trying things out afterwards. Dr Malle & Dr Schmickl Dr. Malle & Dr. Schmickl

Vinegar with no alcohol

Dan23 am 17.01.2022 12:11:52 | Region: Florida

Hello all, this is my first time trying to make vinegar and I have what is probably a basic question. Six days ago I gathered some oak exudate from a wound on the trunk and mixed it into a sugar solution (using molasses) with a potential ABV of 4.5%. This was in hopes of capturing and propagating a saccharomyces strain of yeast, in order to ferment some alcohol and later try and turn it to vinegar. For 2 or 3 days I oxygenated it with an aquarium aerator. Well, strange thing--this morning I smelled it and it already smells like vinegar. How can that be? After 6 days in solution, there has been only a hint of bubbles, so it's hard to imagine any significant alcohol production by yeast, much less a chance for an acetobacter to have converted it to acetic acid. In reading about heterofermentative lactic-acid-producing bacteria, I learned that some of them can also produce acetic acid directly from sugar (if I understood right), so perhaps that's what's happening? pH is currently at 4.6. Unfortunately, silly me, I did not check the pH at the beginning of this process 6 days ago.

Any thoughts on what might be happening?

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RE: Vinegar with no alcohol

Tom am 03.02.2022 09:33:43 | Region: Tyrol

Yes, aeration only attracts vinegar bacteria, not so much yeast. Do not confuse: In principle it's true, yeast will grow if aerated, but doing this only makes sense if you have added cultured yeast beforehand and nevertheless you will always run the risk of introducing an infection of (at this stage unwanted) vinegar bacteria.


"...only a hint of bubbles..." this is already enough to perfectly feed your unwanted infection. Vinegar bacteria can also feed on very low concentrations of alcohol.

Nobody can tell which mixture of microorganisms you have introduced by the aeration, so, of course, yes, this could also be possible. It's just a kind of lottery, you can't predict the end result.


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