Vinegar - a non-alcoholic drinker’s secret ingredient?

Drinking Vinegar? Really?

Doing shots of Apple Cider Vinegar (“ACV", IYKYK) have been de rigeur in health circles for some time. Said to aid in digestion and provide beneficial bacteria to the gut, some people will ‘get it in them’ on the daily, but jury’s out as to whether they actually enjoy this practice. What if we drank vinegar, and actually liked it?  

We're big believers in the value of vinegars as ingredients for building full flavoured drinks, and proud to stock a variety of local, organic 100 percent fruit vinegars. Browse our current selection of vinegars here.

Shrubs, switchels, and scobys, oh my

For a while there if you were looking for a non-alcoholic drink at a nice cocktail-forward type restuarant or bar, you’d likely see a shrub or kombucha as your only options. (‘Shrubs’ use vinegar as a base, but then are often further sweetened, possibly diluted, and perhaps infused with additional flavour ingredients / mixed with fruit syrups, and are designed to be diluted further, i.e with soda water or tonic)

Kombucha of course is the beverage made of sweetened tea that’s fermented with a jellyfish like ’SCOBY’. The rise of kombucha in the last decade might have also been responsible for the backlash against ‘sourness’ - but as with anything, when done with a careful hand, of course kombucha, or vinegars generally, can offer complexity and satisfaction in drink form.

Switchels are a sour drink made from diluted vinegar that’s sweetened and flavoured, often with ginger and citrus. According to our #1 regular, switchels are having a real revival in cute small American towns, cause they’re affordable, easy to make, shelf stable, and infinitely riffable. This drink is closely tied to American settlement and agriculture, sometimes being called ‘haymaker’s punch’, but it may have Caribbean origins - at least in its ingredients - relying on cane sugar or molasses, ginger, and citrus. The history of drinks in North America is of course also tied to colonization. 

If you’re not into sour flavours in general, drinking vinegar is probably not for you - but if you are curious and appreciate ‘craft’ products, and are curious about how fermentation adds depth and complexity to ingredients, diving deeper into vinegars can be a fun way to support local makers of craft products, and provide you with a unique shelf stable pantry item with huge versatility. 

Roman Empire to Recent Trends

Companies like Tart in the US have been leading the more recent charge to put some respect on vinegar’s name, showing that it can be a ‘craft’ product, not just a cheap condiment or afterthought in your salad dressing. Their flavours tend to skew savoury - but I bet ‘fig leaf’ or ‘ginger/nettle/citrus’ would be lovely mixed in a drink.

This isn’t a recent trend though. Any culture with wine or fermentation likely also drinks vinegar. And lets be real, pre-refrigeration and pre-modern sanitation practices, you’d be hard pressed to have liquids NOT ferment, and where there’s fermentation, acetic bacteria is probably around as well.

When wine turned acetic, Romans would flavour it (with herbs, spices, etc) and dilute it for drinking as a palate cleanser or refreshment. They called it Posca, and some point to this as an early example of vermouth.

Ancient Greece made ‘oxymels’ - vinegars sweetened with honey and infused with herbs - herbs chosen for health benefits and enjoyment. Herbs extracted in vinegar and honey were thought to offer more benefit than if simply eaten fresh or dried, and then this shelf stable concoction is available for use year round.

We personally need to read more about the history of ‘vinegar as drink' as there are likely examples beyond our euro-centric western scope of awareness - but no research is required to know that complex and delicious vinegars are made the world over.  

Vinegar is made from wine - wine is made from agricultural products. Processing ingredients into wine is a form of capturing their goodness for use and enjoyment all year long. It’s an easy leap from ‘wine’ to ‘vinegar’ - and both of these products are then shelf stable, and useful for preserving foods as well. 

How is vinegar made?

To make vinegar, first you must ferment sugars into a ‘wine'. In the instances of wine vinegar, a grape wine is produced. Apple cider vinegar - you guessed it - made from fermented apple juice. After the base wine is complete, acetic bacteria turns the alcohol into acetic acid, aka the sour flavour. This fermentation step can be kickstarted by inoculating the wine with a previous batch, or by adding the ‘mother’. (The strandy thing you might recognize from the bottom of unfiltered vinegars from the health food store.) 

When vinegars have flavours like fruits and spices listed on them, in many cases, it’s because a base vinegar has been infused with these ingredients after the fact. There’s nothing wrong with this - but it’s a different process from making the vinegar out of the thing itself, which requires a great deal of skill, and more importantly time. 

Commercial vinegar is made from very basic ethanol, derived from mass produced and cheap inputs. The base wine could be rushed through fermentation and inoculated with acetic acid in a process that can be counted in hours, or a couple days. When done ‘the real way’ the process is measured in weeks and months. 

Local Artisan - Salt Spring Island Artisan Vinegar 

Salt Spring Island Artisan Vinegar is the project of Bree Eagle, who single-handedly produces a dizzying variety of delicious and complex fruit vinegars on their property on Salt Spring Island.

Bree uses fruit sourced in season sourced as close to home as possible, which often means directly from small farms on-island, or from nearby Vancouver Island, only occasionally using inputs from as far as BC’s Okanagan Valley for those fruits that may require a longer hotter growing season than our coastal climes offer.

These vinegars are made in small batches based on what fruit is at hand throughout the year. New ferments are being started as things come into season.

Bree makes a line of ‘normal’ culinary vinegars, i.e. skewing savoury and unsweetened, as well as a line of ‘balsamic’ vinegars. The balsamic vinegars are lightly sweetened with the addition of a concentrated reduction made from the fruit used in the vinegar itself. 

These vinegars have a little more body and sweetness than the ’normal’ lineup, making them useful tools in the drink kitchen.  

Of course you can drizzle them on your favourite fruit, cheeses, and salads as well, but we think they taste beautiful in soda water or as a splash of ‘je ne sais quoi’ in your other liquid concoctions. 

Also, these vinegars are all unpasteurized, meaning you can enjoy the benefits of the bacterial culture, which is said to support gut health. 

If you find yourself on Salt Spring Island, be sure to visit Bree at the Saturday market to taste flavours she’s bottling up.