apple cider vinegar recipe homemade

hey, look! nina went to the farmstand. look what she got: apple cider. you know what i'm gonna do with it, don't you? i'm gonna ferment it! well, not to necessarily make applejack out of it. well, actually, i am going to make applejack out of it but not to drink. to make apple cider vinegar! this is great stuff.

the nice thing about finding this at the farm stand is right here: "no preservatives" if you buy this stuff at the supermarket,very often it's got sodium bisulfite in it which will keep it from fermenting and you're not going to get any fermentation action. anything you put in that: yeast, bacteria, it won't ferment. that's why they put the

sodium bisulfite in. this is from the farm stand. this is the stuff you want to look for and this little label right here: no preservatives. the first step in making your apple cider vinegar is to ferment the apple cider into what's considered like an apple jack-- that is, to do a yeast ferment on the cider and convert the sugar content of the

apple juice into alcohol and we'll do that with yeast. this is a champagne yeast that i like. it's made by red star. these are about a dollar a packet, online. this is enough for five gallons in here so we're just going to put a little tiny bit in each jar. it's yeast! it will reproduce, so an eighth of a teaspoon? the tiniest little bit!

you really don't want a lot. let's get some in other jar while we're at it. if you can see i've got an eighth of a teaspoon. the cider goes straight in. these are just gallon jugs from the liquor store. you probably recognize them. i think one was a a gallo burgundy and i don't know what the other one was but definitely save your big jars

for fermenting. if you've got a friend that's a big wine drinker and you can con them into drinking a bottle of this stuff. you can easily pick up a bottle of it for about 15 bucks. it'll cost you that alone for the for the glass jug so might as well spread the wealth to friends. nice thing about putting in the yeast

first: the juice definitely agitates the yeast and gets it mixed in with the beverage here but i know your first reaction might be to go ahead and this is a gallon jug right here! why don't i just ferment in this? this is plastic you really don't want to ferment in plastic. sure, there's new bpa-free plastics and everything but if you really are doing any

serious fermenting you want to do it in glass. we need to close this off. this is gonna be fermenting. the yeast is going to convert the sugar into alcohol and the byproduct of that is carbon dioxide so we need to trap the carbon dioxide in there and that will prevent any mold growth but we want to allow the carbon dioxide (there's going to be quite a bit

of it) to breathe and get out. you can do that with a with an airlock fermenter. what you do is ... this little mark on here? you fill this up with water and stick it in a cork. close it up. (trick: get it wet) and then this can go right in here. add a little bit of water while it's not already sealed. you can see this is a nice tight seal i've got, but go ahead

and fill that up just to the line and close it up and the air will come up and bubble through here and no oxygen can get into here that can for upset our yeast ferment. rinse and repeat. alright! these are ready to go down into the cellar. we'll check on them in a day or two and see how the fermenting is going. we're going to ferment

this for about a month to get the bulk of the of the sugar out and then we can go into the second step which will be the bacterial ferment of the alcohol into vinegar. so here's where our apple cider will spend the next month or so of its life. i've got it up on top of shelf over by the refrigerator where it'll stay warm. you can see i've got it in a

plastic box. every once in a while, we get a warm day and the yeast takes off and the apple juice foams up and it bubbles out right through that airlock, that we were just looking at. so, just as a precaution, i put both jugs in a plastic bucket so if they do decide to vomit, we will be will be ready for the for the overflow. let's check back on this in a couple of days

and see how ferments are coming along. oh, this looks great! you can see the carbon dioxide bubbling out through the airlock. you can see the tiny bubbles coming up inside the jug and breaking at the surface there and forming a little bit of foam. this is perfect. this is just what i want to see. this will go on for probably

another two weeks. we'll check it again. so, this site has been sitting down in the basement for about two weeks and i'm going to check on it every couple of days and watch the bubbling action the bubbling really took off fast and furious towards day 5 through day seven, eight, nine, something like that and what happens when it's doing is that it's

fermenting. the yeast is eating up all the sugars. the yeast are reproducing like crazy and as the yeast is reproducing they're splitting and and giving off and dying and all those yeast bodies that sink to the bottom here and, slowly as as we ferment liquids, all those dead bodies and all the little bits of apple in the apple juice start to settle

out so you can see that there's this bottom here. some people call it "sots". what you want to do is pour when you pour this off: you want to pour it into the crock and leave all that behind. we're trying to refine this juice the best we can and that way our finished product apple cider vinegar will be a nice clear product and won't have all

this sediment in it. we really want to get away from having all this sediment in the in the finished product so let's see if we can pull this off without its upsetting the sediment too much... i just want to let this bubble here in the neck. some air can find its way here. now some air can come there and not bubble as much in

the neck. i can pour a little faster but you can watch that sentiment sit there. this smells great! any of you applejack fans? basically, what we have here is applejack. the key is if you like to drink, don't drink this because it's delicious and you'll be addicted and you won't have anything

left... whoa! you won't have any left to make vinegar with. so, we'll pour... i got i think i was pretty close to line! i'll strain the rest of this but this top part i can pour off nicely and get what i want. just let that air coming in the neck so doesn't agitate that the bottom sediment. if you have a siphon tube, you can siphon

it out of these bottles. that is the probably the best way to do this. i'm going for simplicity here. i know not everyone on youtube has access to a siphon. that's good enough. right! so, i got two gallons minus 2 inches in both jars. [laughs] next, we're going to want to inoculate the cider (applejack, basically, is what we have here: apple wine) with

acetobacters. what we were doing before is a yeast ferment and using yeast to ferment the sugars in the apple juice into alcohol which give off carbon dioxide. next we're going to use acetobacters which is found in some unpasteurized vinegar. this bragg's product, probably seen a lot of on the internet, a lot of people buy this stuff. this was four

dollars, i think, for a pint. we're making a couple of gallons here so i don't mind spending a couple of bucks to get as much as i do but, basically, this is the acetobacter. this is the bacteria that will convert the alcohol into acetic acid. acetobacter - acetic acid. so we're going to add half a bottle.

that oughta' do it. we'll save the rest of it for the next batch. from here: back to where we were. let's cover it up keep the dust out, keep flies out, keep the the the fruit flies from finding this and laying eggs in it and you'll get vinegar heels which are baby... just basically the fly larvae swimming around. no, not pleasant! but they're

harmless. if you get vinegar eels, don't flip out! don't dump the whole thing out. strain it. keep going. but best of all, just put, i throw a towel over it. some people tie the towel on. what you need is air. what we're doing now is we're using these acetobacter. with the yeast, we wanted to do what anaerobic, an airless ferment.

this is aerobic bacteria so it needs the air exchange. it needs some air so a little bit will get through this towel. it will give off some carbon dioxide. mostly what's going to give off is cellulose as the acetobacters break down the alcohol, they're going to give off cellulose and what will happen is that you'll see it. slowly, a layer will form of

cellulose, floating on top of this and so we have to do is try to make that. it's kind of a cool thing> you actually make a vinegar mother in doing this. the vinegar mother, like the bottle says, "with the mother" is kind of dissolved and very particular in this, but if you let this sit for, at this point, a couple of weeks, again, you'll

form a mother. it will grow in this and you'll have a vinegar mother and you won't have to buy this anymore. so, once you start making batches of vinegar, you'll actually have a vinegar mother that you can cut up and add to the batches of fermented juice and then you'll have a way to constantly be making vinegar. so i'm doing now is i'm

going to take this and put this downstairs and i'll see you again in a couple of weeks! a real handy way to clean out that jugs, once you're done fermenting, is to use a bottle-washer. this is something you can pick up on amazon for a couple of dollars. basically, it screws onto your tap. you need to find a tap in your house that

has a proper kind of fitting. you can buy an adapter for these that will fit pretty much anything. basically, attach it to your hardware, turn on the water and this acts like a switch. so, when you push down on this

apple cider vinegar recipe homemade,with the edge of the jug, it rinses out the bottle with high pressure spray. [loud screeching noise]

clean as a whistle!