Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
This means that every gram of alcohol will result in 60.5/
46.07 or 1.313 grams of vinegar. A gram of alcohol will
occupy 1/.789 or 1.27 cm3. Alcohol percentages are done by
volume, but vinegar percentages are done by weight. We can
get a good idea of the conversion factor, that is, how much
acetic acid a given amount of ethanol will create, by doing the
math for a hypothetical 10% wine.
If I have a liter of 10% wine, that liter contains 100 ml of
alcohol. 100 ml of alcohol has a mass of 100 cm3/1.27 cm3 or
78.7 grams. The mass of the vinegar produced will be 78.7 *
1.313 or 103 grams.
Therefore, a 10% alcohol by volume wine will create a 10.3%
by weight vinegar. So in essence the percentages are
identical. Knowing this fact will allow us to dilute the beer or
wine we are adding to the vinegar mother to produce a
vinegar of known strength. We'd still test it just to be sure, of
course. But this allows us to make our vinegar very precisely.
How to Safely Use Homemade Vinegar in Canning
All canning topics tell you to never use homemade vinegar in
canning. That's because pickling recipes rely upon the
vinegar having a certain strength of 5%, and if you use
vinegar of a lesser strength you could wind up with
botulism-tainted food that could kill you. So if you don't
know for sure that the strength of your vinegar is 5% or
greater, you can't use it safely. Of course, if the vinegar is
substantially stronger than 5% you could wind up with
pickled foods that are a lot more acidic than you'd like. You
can always dilute it if it is too strong.
