Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
as Mycoderma aceti, is a gelatinous substance containing the
AAB that forms on the surface of vinegar. Though vinegar
could certainly be made from Gluconobacter oxydans or
Acetobacter pasteurianus among many other possibilities, all
of the commercially available vinegar mothers are
Acetobacter aceti.
Acetobacter aceti needs to float on top of the wine or beer you
use to make vinegar so that it has access to oxygen at all
times. Without access to oxygen, it will go dormant. The
vinegar mother you obtain may look like crude vinegar, or it
may look like jelly. If it looks like jelly, it is very likely that
when you put it in your vinegar crock, it will sink and thereby
go dormant for lack of oxygen. To prevent this, a piece of thin
wood about the size of a playing card is floated on top of the
wine or beer, and the vinegar mother is placed on it. This
piece of wood is usually made of oak and is called a vinegar
raft.
Vinegar mothers are available as white wine, red wine, beer/
malt, and cider. All of them have the same acetic acid
bacteria, and the only difference is the carrier. In small
batches of vinegar—say less than a gallon—the carrier makes
a difference in the flavor, but in larger batches of vinegar the
carrier doesn't matter.
Some strains of acetic acid bacteria, such as gluconobacter
oxydans, will go dormant once all of the ethyl alcohol has
been consumed. But the Acetobacter aceti that you'll be using
does not go dormant once all of the ethyl alcohol is used.
Instead, it starts consuming the acetic acid that it produced,
with the end result being just carbon dioxide. So vinegar
conversions using a commercial vinegar mother must be
