It’s been six months since I moved into my vinegar shack (read: converted shipping container) at the Dornoch Distillery bottling warehouse site. It’s been an interesting mix of fermentation experiments, 3D Tetris using whisky casks and Schützenbach generators, and DIY (and some surreptitious wildflower seed-bombing).
I read about how to make vinegar for nearly two years before I took the leap to actually quit my job, but there’s only so much book learning can do for you. Doing it is a completely different experience.
I’d read that my off-the-shelf generator could convert 100 litres in 14 days (I now realise I misread that) when in reality it took close to two months. That was a setback for production, so I had to sit down and do some experiments. Was it not enough oxygen? Were the bacteria not warm enough, or too warm? Did I need to “backslop” the alcohol with active vinegar before starting the cycle? If so, with how much? What about if I used a different packing material?
It took a few months, but I answered these questions (yes; not warm enough; no; and woah) and now I have six generators pumping out a collective average of 490g of acetic acid per day. My star of the show was Big Momma – a 55L Fermzilla I filled with wood wool, the shredded stuff you usually see round fancy wine hampers. Great British Wood Wool make a particular one for vinegar makers with larch, milled without the use of chemicals so nothing leaches into the vinegar. Big Momma’s top rate was 1200g/day on a nice sunny day, and I saw her exothermic reaction pump out 42ºC (admittedly a little high for comfortable bacteria). Six days it took her to convert 100L.
Sadly Big Momma died recently due to starvation – I went down to London for a trip with Scotland Food and Drink seeing how Organic status helps food producers, but there was an issue while I was away and those poor acetobacter didn’t get any alcohol at all. Five days and my best generator was gone.
These setbacks never floor me though – it’s really all part of the fun. Big Momma was stripped, refilled and recolonised and now lives on as La Madre Grande. She’s young, but two days in she’s producing 100g/day so I have faith we’ll see Big Momma’s personal bests beaten.
I work in vinegar shack full time. Five days a week, eight hours a day, and sometimes I wonder what it is I do in here on my own surrounded by vinegar and casks. But then I look back and… I’ve done a heck of a lot!
I learnt how to mash grain with Dan and Connor at Dornoch Distillery, about striking temperatures and beta-amylase and using grain itself to filter the bed.
I sanded the rusty hoops on old whisky casks then made a blend of linseed oil and beeswax (from my mum’s beehives) to protect them.
I designed and built my own Schützenbach generators to keep up with my planned production schedule.
Speaking of which, I wrote, scrapped and rewrote the production schedule almost every day.
I built my own software to track the vinegar from grain, to wort, to alcoholic fermentation, to acetification, to cask ageing to bottling, with inbuilt auditing trail and analytics.
I waged war on fruit flies.
Most excitingly the casks are starting to fill. Peated vinegar has gone into three Glen Garioch casks, and two of the Solera are full to the brim with beautiful vinegar. I feel like I turned my back for a second and all of a sudden I have… a fair amount of stock!
Enough so that I’ve started reaching out to some of my longer term supporters. Ones who have been there from the original concept. I’ve been lucky that with my Thompson Brothers connection I’ve been put in touch with some exceptionally cool establishments and chefs… More on that later, but I can’t wait to see what they do with it, and early feedback is really encouraging.
A select few have been contacted for first dibs on bulk product.
Once my branding comes through by mid next month, you better be ready for it. Dornoch Craft Vinegar is going live. Yes, you will finally be able to get your hands on this tart, juicy acid. Now that’s my kind of vinegar, baby.