People keep asking me why I’m making vinegar.
It’s a fair question. It’s not the most obvious thing to build a life around, especially from a small town in the Scottish Highlands. But the honest answer is that I didn’t set out with a business plan and a gap in the market. I saw an opportunity to work with some genuinely amazing people and make something that didn’t exist yet.
Phil and Simon Thompson at Dornoch Distillery produce some of the most interesting whisky in Scotland. They also have one of the most extraordinary cask collections I’ve ever seen — we’re talking ex-rare malts, 1970s Ben Nevis, a cask from the nineties that once held French wine. When I realised I could take their organic heritage barley wort — the sweet liquid from mashing — ferment it with my own yeast, run it through acetic fermentation and then age it in those casks, the question wasn’t really “should I do this?” It was more like “I can’t wait to try this out!”
at Dornoch Distillery
Scotland has always had something in its bedrock. In the coastlines, in the people. We’re knacky and a bit puckish — generations of Scots hiding whisky stills when they weren’t legally allowed to make it, constantly finding new ways to take barley, water and yeast and turn them into one of our biggest exports.
What I’m doing is the same energy. Same raw ingredients, different alchemy. Barley goes in one end, and instead of spirit coming out the other, you get vinegar — barrel-aged, living, unpasteurised, with a depth and complexity that nothing from a factory will ever touch.
And here’s why I think it actually matters, beyond my own obsession. A splash of this in a pan after searing meat and the deglazing liquid has a character — warm, malty, rounded from the wood — that transforms a Tuesday night dinner.
It’s unpasteurised, so the mother culture is still alive in the bottle, which means it’s naturally functional: three ingredients, nothing else, clean label. Delicious first, and the health benefits are a happy bonus.
That combination — something that makes your food taste noticeably better AND is a genuinely living, organic product — just gets you feeling good inside and out. Complex flavours you can’t find anywhere else.
The process matters too. I ferment the wort myself to about 6% ABV, then it goes through a Schützenbach acetification column — a method that dates back to the 1700s — where the acetic acid bacteria convert the alcohol into vinegar. Then it ages in the distillery’s ex-whisky casks in a four-tier Solera system, which means every bottle contains a component of every batch I’ve ever made. The whole process, from grain to bottle, happens here in Dornoch. Nothing imported, nothing blended, nothing shortcut.
I think there’s a reason this kind of making resonates right now. Gregorie Marshall at Blackthorn Salt built a graduation thorn tower on the Ayrshire coast — the first in the UK — and spent twelve years working out how to trickle Scottish seawater through blackthorn branches to make salt using a technique that goes back to the sixth century. That’s not a business decision. That’s someone who is completely consumed by a process and can’t stop until they’ve understood it. I feel a deep kinship with that energy, and I think people respond to it because they can tell it’s real. You can’t fake obsession. You can’t manufacture twelve years of trial and error. You can’t pretend to have read documents from the 1700s about acetification methods because you thought it would look good on a label.
circa 1700s
Which is why it still feels slightly surreal that Mr Lyan has invited me to talk about all of this on a Studio Lates panel in London alongside Gregorie and Blackthorn Salt and Angela Clutton, whose book The Vinegar Cupboard won the Jane Grigson Trust Award and basically wrote the modern case for taking vinegar seriously. Mr Lyan has a joyous obsession with good food — his Taste Trip videos, his approach to flavour, the way he treats ingredients with genuine intellectual curiosity rather than just using them. When he asked about barley varieties and knew the difference between wort and wash, I remember thinking “oh, he actually gets it.” (of course he did!)
Being asked onto that panel isn’t something I’d have predicted when I was standing in a pantry doing titration tests at 11pm, but I think it makes sense in a way that matters to me — it’s not an award or a PR moment, it’s an invitation from someone who cares about process to come and talk about process, in front of people who care about process. That’s the room I want to be in.
I’m a bit feral about the whole subject now, if I’m honest. And the thing is, I’m still so early in this. There’s a whole world of flavour and fermentation ahead of me that I haven’t even begun to explore — what different barrel types do to the vinegar over time, how fermentation temperature changes the ester profile, whether different mother cultures have their own personalities the way sourdough starters do. I don’t know the answers to most of those questions yet. I just know I’m going to spend the next few years finding out, and I can’t think of anything I’d rather be doing.
