Vinegar Mother Hotels: Caring for Homemade Wine and Fruit Vinegars

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Once you’ve made your first batch of homemade vinegar, a new set of questions begins. What do you keep for the next batch? How do you feed an ongoing culture? And what do you do when the mothers begin to outnumber the jars?

In this installment of Luxury Vinegars, I’m sharing how I look after the vinegars in my own kitchen over time. We’re setting up vinegar mother “hotels,” feeding wine-vinegar cultures, renewing fruit batches, and finding useful homes for extra mothers.

Feeding the Wine and Apple Cider Vinegars

For my ongoing wine vinegars, I feed with wine. For apple cider vinegar, hard cider provides the alcoholic feed.

This is the part of vinegar making that becomes a kitchen routine: drawing off some vinegar to use, keeping some back, and feeding the continuing culture.

In the video, I show how I manage that process alongside the mothers I’m saving for future batches.

Beginning the Next Fruit Batch

My dark raisin, golden raisin, banana, pineapple, pear, and fig vinegars follow a different routine.

For those, I begin a fresh batch with the matching fruit or juice and carry some raw vinegar forward from the previous batch. I’m renewing the fruit base while keeping a connection to the vinegar I’ve already made.

Hard cider belongs with my apple cider vinegar. For these other varieties, I want to keep their individual fruit character.

What to Do With Extra Mothers

You don’t have to keep every mother your vinegar produces.

I compost the extras I don’t need or give them to someone who would like to begin making vinegar. When I share a mother, I include some raw vinegar from the same batch.

It’s a lovely way to pass a useful kitchen skill along to a friend.