Rensselaer Republican, Volume 12, Number 16, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 January 1880 — A Prime Article of Vinegar. [ARTICLE]

A Prime Article of Vinegar.

The fact that a prime article of vinegar always finds a ready market at a remunerative price makes it worth the while of every fanner having a surplus amount of apples and cider on hand to turn his attention to: the manufacture of cider-vinegar, which is the best kind made. When vinegar is manufactured directly from the apples the usual method is to grind the fruit coarsely, cutting it up just sufficiently to gam juice, and let the pomace remain in a vat for several days, long enough to undergo fermentation. Then press out and expose the juice in open vat or vessel two or three days, after which draw it off into barrels or casks and let remain in a warm place, with the bungs out, until ready for drawing off and bottling or storing in closed barrels. To convert cider into vinegar by allowing the v acid fermentation to take piace in a proper temperature requires considerable time. Tne cider is placed in casks or barrels—iron-bound whisky casks or old vinegar barrels are best—with the bungs out and stored either in loft, out-house or similar spot, wanned by the sun’s rays or kept at the right temperature by artificial heat. Fanners not unfrequently add a small amount of vinegar, water or a little “mother” to hasten the operation. When a rapid conversion is desired the cider is moved to a higher temperature and poured from one barrel to another, to bring it into more direct contact with the air; or it is divided and exposed to the air by placing it where it will trickle through a cask filled with oak, beech or birch shavings previously moistened in vinegar By allowing the liquid to pass through the shavings two or three times it is soon converted into strong vinegar. A method for many years practiced in France, and described in the Maine Farmer, is substantially as follows: Old cider or vinegar barrels, if sound, are preferred to new ones, but if new they are washed with scalding water; boiling vinegar is next poured in and the bung closed and the barrel allowed to stand until its sides become thoroughly saturated with the vinegar. This requires from one to three days, according to the material of which the barrel is made. After this preparation it is filled about one-third with strong and pure cider vinegar and two gallons of cider. Every eighth day thereafter riVo gallons of cider are added until the barrel is two-thirds full. In fourteen days after the last two gallons are added the whole will have turned into vinegar, one-half of which is drawn off and the process of filling with cider begun again. In summer the oxygenation will go on in the sun, but in cool weather the liquid is kept where the heat can be maintained at about eighty degrees. By this process it takes a little more than two months to produce sixteen gallons of vinegar.— N. Y. World.