Well the original person that posed this question said
that he only wanted to hear from someone who had
actually made honey vinegar, so I kept my yap shut.

Then I read Bill Truesdale's tales of vinegar woe and
decided to weigh in.

I'm an amateur beekeeper (2 hives) that I started
three years ago to get my own honey to make mead. (I
make a LOT of mead.) Those two hives have been pretty
successful (180 lbs the first year and 240 lbs a year
for the last 2 years), so much so that I have too much
mead. Part of this problem arises because other
amateur beekeepers keep giving me pails of honey, but
that's another story.

So I had been thinking about this excess mead, some of
which had stopped fermenting at a point that was, for
me, too sweet. After some reading I did the following.

I went to the health food store and bought a quart of
Bragg's "all natural unpasteurized cider vinegar with
the mother". This was the easiest way I had found to
get a vinegar mother without having to deal with mail
order. I picked the bottle that was the cloudiest.

I then cleaned and sanitized a 3 gallon stoneware
crock that came from Grammy's house when she moved.
Into the crock I added 2 1/2 gallons of the too-sweet
mead, the quart of Bragg's vinegar and one 12 ounce
bottle of Herb Garden Metheglyn. Herb Garden Metheglyn
is a wax cappings mead which I flavored with fresh
herb garden tarragon, sage, thyme, marjoram, and anise
seeds. It's quite strong still and a 12 ounce bottle
is more than enough.

I then aerated to get some oxygen into the mixture,
covered the crock with a very fine nylon mesh cloth
and moved it far away from my mead-making area.
Aerobacters are not a good thing to have in your
fermenting area.

For a couple of weeks it smelled just like a quart of
vinegar in some sweet mead, but in the last week
something must be happening because the aroma is much
stronger and definitely herbal in nature. In fact, it
smells WONDERFUL!

Instructions say it should sit for six months so we'll
see.

Chuck Wettergreen (in digest mode)
beekeeper
meadmaker
and now, mead vinegar too!
Geneva, IL

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